The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,776 posts.
NIST is about to announce the new hash algorithm that will become SHA-3. This is the result of a six-year competition, and my own Skein is one of the five remaining finalists (out of an initial 64). It’s probably too late for me to affect the final decision, but I am hoping for “no award.” It’s not that the new hash…
This specification describes a JavaScript API for performing basic cryptographic operations in web applications, such as hashing, signature generation and verification, and encryption and decryption. Additionally, it describes an API for applications to generate and/or manage the keying material necessary to perform…
Update: Virgin fixed the issue Tuesday night after taking their login page down for four hours. Please see my update at the bottom of this post.
Is your PIN number too predictable? Detailed analysis on PIN number databases.
Yesterday I posted a post mortem on an outage we had Saturday. The outage was caused when we applied an overly aggressive rate limit to traffic on our network while battling a determined DDoS attacker.
Who likes being treated like they’re in a minority group? Unless it means you’re in that exclusive group of playboy (or girl) billionaires, “minority group” often ends up with you being unfairly discriminated against because you don’t represent the perceived majority. As with social discrimination, technology…
I’m doing a deep dive into the pre-history of the Fourth Amendment, and am continuously amazed at how perfectly the condemnations of the “general warrants” that incensed the Framers apply to the programmatic authority granted the NSA under the FISA Amendments Act. The legal challenge to that statute is currently hung…
After nearly three years of work, I have a pleasure to announce that Qubes 1.0 has finally been released! To see the installation instructio...
This morning, a bipartisan group of Representatives, led by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), sent a pointed letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano protesting the recent spat of domain name seizures—executed on dubious copyright grounds—that have...
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under homomorphic-hashing , damn-cool-algorithms , fountain-codes
The latest cybersecurity trends, best practices, security vulnerabilities, and more.
Today I went to launch VMware 4.1.0 on my OS X 10.8.1 Mac and was met with this surprising refusal to open:
Today we're launching Capture the Flag: Web Edition, a security contest where you can try your hand at discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities in mock web applications.
Normally I avoid complaining about Apple because (a) there are plenty of other people carrying that flag, and (b) I honestly like Apple and own numerous lovely iProducts. I’m even using one t…
Tell me if you’ve been in this situation: you’re chatting about online anonymity with your wife and the other Knight-Mozilla Fellows over a pizza in Florence. A quiet-spoken stranger who had been sitting across the room walks up to your table and says “are you all here for the Tor hackathon?” You respond “why yes, yes…
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
Excellent blog post by Valerie Aurora about sexual harassment at the DefCon hackers conference. Aside from the fact that this is utterly reprehensible behavior by the perpetrators involved, this is a real problem for our community. The response of “this is just what hacker culture is, and changing it will destroy…
UPDATE: it appears that the pathetic cowards who perjured themselves filing these maliciously false copyright infringement claims have chick...
