The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,778 posts.
Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other…
I don’t normally do negative posts about another person or company, but I feel this needs to get out there. A few hours ago I received an email from MediaTemple , where I host several of my clients. It was an automated message informing me that:
If you allow players in an online world to penalize each other, you open the door to extortion: One of the features that supported user socialization in the game was the ability to declare that another user was a trusted friend. The feature involved a graphical display that showed the faces of users who had declared…
A new system for ensuring accurate election tallies, which MIT researchers helped to develop, passed its first real-world test last Tuesday.
Visa,Master Card,Discover, and American Express credit card validation and generation techniques using the luhn algorithm.
The HMAC construction turns a cryptographic hash algorithm into a keyed hash. It is commonly used for integrity protection when the sender and recipient share a secret key. It was developed to addr…
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
If you know your way around a professional writers' room, you know how to use WritersRoom Pro ®
At Mozilla , we regularly get anguished emails from people who have paid to download Firefox, and have then discovered a) that it's actually free, and b) that it's very hard to get the company they paid to stop charging their credit card. For those who have never had the misfortune to visit one of these trap sites, I…
From time to time it’s good to take a break from all the ultra-low-level stuff, like e.g. chipset or TXT hacking, and do something simple, y...
At one site where I provide technical assistance, access to the network is all done via ssh over the Internet. However, one can't get access to the machines directly; one must first make an ssh connection to a gateway box I'll call martha. martha doesn't allow one to use regular passwords or keys, though. We're all…
Posted by James Bennett on Oct. 9, 2009
Google’s GMail blog has some “handy” advice on how pick a good password to project your email account. Don’t use dictionary words, use mixed case,…
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Created May 21, 2005. Last updated January 10, 2014. Thanks to Aryeh Leib Taurog for the hover code.
Last week we were dragged over the coals — and rightfully so — for failing to communicate clearly regarding a security exploit that was discovered in early August. It turned out that the issue was related to Ruby on Rails. The exploit affected multiple products (ours and others). Aft…
Complexity can be thought of as a type of code smell : It doesn't necessarily imply that there is a problem, but the presence of complexity is very strongly correlated with the presence of security vulnerabilities. In the design and construction of secure systems, it is important to not only consider mistakes which…
I bet 10 years ago none of us thought that 140 characters would change the landscape of Social Media quite so much. However, with close to 289,000,000 active users sending around 6,000 tweets every second Twitter has proven its critics wrong. Obviously, having gotten over …
