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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 184 posts.
What does $1265 of bugs look like?
To start with, there's a lot of spelling mistakes — 53, by my count. Within a few hours of my announcing the bug bounties, someone had run a spell checker against all of the comments in the Tarsnap source code and found about half of these; the rest, consisting mostly of cases where one English word was replaced by…
Do not upgrade to PHP 5.3.7 due to a bug in crypt()
PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.
Nym Wars (Google+ "real name" rules)
I hadn't been paying much attention to the Google "Real Names" clusterfuck, because it was so obvious to me that they were going to lose this one in the press that it would all be over soon. But it's still not over, and the Google brass appear to be digging in their heels, despite the universally bad press they're…
A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
(A play in 4 acts. Please feel free to exit along with the stage character that best represents you. Take intermissions as you see fit. Click on the stage if...
Who Does Facebook Think You Are Searching For?
UPDATE March 28, 2013: Many people have commented here and emailed me that it no longer works for you. I have made an update to fix the bookmarklet for those with Facebook Graph Search. You can get…
Undeletable Cookies
A couple of weeks ago Wired reported the discovery of a new, undeletable, web cookie: Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net’s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can’t be evaded—even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers’ “incognito”…
I’m sorry, but were you actually trying to remember your comical passwords?
I love a good XKCD comic; Randall Munroe has a unique way of cutting right to the crux of technology issues and always doing it in a humorous fashion. Little Bobby Tables [http://xkcd.com/327/] remains an all-time classic and it’s amazing how many times you’ll
Why you don't steal from a hacker.
So during the London riots I return home the next morning to find my flat ransacked and my Macbook Pro laptop stolen! Police showed ...
Can we believe our eyes? Misleading people with Unicode.
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Xkcd Password Generator
The button below will generate a random phrase consisting of four common words. According to yesterday’s xkcd strip, such phrases are hard to guess (even by brute force), …
Hackers Can Kill Diabetics w/ Insulin Pumps? Facts vs. Fear Mongering
UPDATE: Jay Radcliffe, the researcher discussed in this post, has emailed me, a ...
H.R.1981, the end of online privacy as we know it.
Space Cybersecurity has become a prominent topic in the news, particularly when it comes to protecting space-related assets and technologies.
Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online
The Nymwars rage on. Over the past several weeks Google has been engaged in a very public struggle with its users over its “real names” policy on Google+, prompting blog posts and editorials debating the pros and cons of allowing pseudonymous accounts on social networking sites. But there is one...
Zero Day Vulnerability in many Wordpress Themes
Big News [April 24th, 2012]: I’ve launched Wordfence to permanently fix your WordPress site’s security issues. Read this now.
LulzSec's 'Topiary' arrested
The Sophos Blog
Aaron Swartz v. United States
(echoes of a broken system) UPDATE: Aaron committed suicide on January 11, 2013.(!) More on his life here. Aaron Swartz is a friend and Cambridge-area polymath whose projects focus on access to kno…
Bitcoin is Not Anonymous
TL;DR Bitcoin is not inherently anonymous. It may be possible to conduct transactions is such a way so as to obscure your identity, but, ...
lloyd.io - How BrowserID Works
lloyd.io is the personal website of Lloyd Hilaiel, a software engineer who lives in Denver, Colorado.