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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 113 posts.
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Hacking Google for Fun and Profit
At the end of last year, Google announced their Vulnerability Reward Program which rewards security researchers for reported security and privacy holes in Google properties. This sounded like an interesting challenge, and I set out to find security holes. I found three, got paid, and am now in the Google Security Hall…
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No Copyright Intended
On October 26, a YouTube user named crimewriter95 posted a full-length version of Pulp Fiction, rearranged in chronological order. A couple things struck me about this video. First, I’m surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film can survive on YouTube for over six weeks without getting…
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Kindle Touch jail broken via ID3 Tag
Update Kindle 5.0.3 has fixed the hole to allow for jailbreak. Upgrading an already jailbroken Kindle Touch is fine as the update does not remove the custom key to allow custom packages. If you on 5.0.3 and have not already installed the key, there is a new jailbreak.
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Be careful what you put in an email
Posts about OMakase written by Om Malik
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Fuck passwords
I’m so tired of passwords. So, so, so tired. Most people don’t understand this. Most people use the same password everywhere. Most people can just mechanically type out password3 in every password box, smirking to themselves at how clever they are, because who would ever guess 3 instead of 1? I don’t do that. Let me…
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Translation of Carrier IQ's Media Release
We Got Caught Doing Something We Were Kind of Hoping No One Would Notice and Now We’re Nervously Placing Exclamation Marks at the End of Our Media Alert Headlines!
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Most laser printer printed pages have tracking watermark
<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><a href="http://brahmsyellowdots.blogspot.com/2008/10/it-begins.html">About This Blog</a>
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A little game to demonstrate timing attacks.
Lauren Ipsum is trying to get past Jane Hecate, a little old lady who holds the Book of Passwords. Jane is older and can't see well, so she has to spell out Lauren's guess letter by letter to check whether it's the right password. How can Lauren use this to her advantage? A story about computer science and other…
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CNN, NYTimes, Mashable all vulnerable to XSS
Pretending innocence, I ask why all these high profile websites have their homepages covered in spinning images? CNN (screenshot) The New York Times (screenshot) Mashable (screenshot) Fox News (screenshot) Okay, obviously enough, I’m messing with them. But how can I do that? The answer is cross site scripting (“XSS”)…
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Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
In a shamefully credulous statement, they say: Proponents of pseudonymity scored a major victory today, when Google executive Vic Gundotra revealed at the Web 2.0 Summit that social networking service Google+ will begin supporting pseudonyms and other types of identity. According to Mashable, Google+ will be "adding…
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Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps
In the beginning, there was the web and you accessed it though the browser and all was good. Stuff didn’t download until you clicked on something; you expected cookies to be tracking you and you always knew if HTTPS was being used. In general, the casual observer had a
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Hiding your data in plain sight: USB hardware hiding
This article will describe the possibility of hiding data in any kind of USB hardware. Even though USB data carriers come in various sizes and forms, which already sometimes makes them hard to recognize, this approach could even make it worse. Any USB device could be a data carrier and thus from a forensics point of…
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Isaac Asimov on Security Theatre.
A great find: In his 1956 short story, “Let’s Get Together,” Isaac Asimov describes security measures proposed to counter a terrorist threat: “Consider further that this news will leak out as more and more people become involved in our countermeasures and more and more people begin to guess what we’re doing. Then…
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Root access to MySQL.com sold for $3k - now serving malware
A security firm revealed today that mysql.com , the central repository for widely-used Web database software, was hacked and booby-trapped to serve visitors with malicious software. The disclosure caught my eye because just a few days ago I saw evidence that administrative access to mysql.com was being sold in the…
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Chrome Privacy
Dave Winer ends an otherwise quite reasonable piece about his concern at Facebook's
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OnStar Begins Spying On Customers’ GPS Location For Profit
I canceled the OnStar subscription on my new GMC vehicle today after receiving an email from the company about their new terms and conditions. While most people, I imagine, would hit the delete button when receiving something as exciting as new terms and conditions, being the nerd sort, I decided to have a personal…