Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,337 posts.

Security & Privacy
Any year
3964

The Most Incompetent TSA Story Yet?

The storyline: TSA screener finds two pipes in passenger’s bags. Screener determines that they’re not a threat. Screener confiscates them anyway, because of their “material and appearance.” Because they’re not actually a threat, screener leaves them at the checkpoint. Everyone forgets about them. Six hours later, the…

3967

One Year After ‘The Big Hack’

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Bloomberg’s publication of a story about Chinese intelligence intercepting the supply chain of Supermicro, a company which has built and sold servers to Amazon, Apple, the U.S. Department of Defense, and dozens of other companies. Apparently, they developed a chip that looked…

3977

TOFU: Do You Check?

Let’s say you’re on a fresh machine. Maybe you’ve just started a new job or you’ve wiped your machine. You’re about to push some code you’ve written and you get this: $ git push The authenticity of host 'github.com (140.82.121.4)' can't be established. ED25519 key fingerprint is…

3978

SSH Do’s and Don’ts

Do Use SSH Keys When ever you can use a key for SSH. Once you create it, you can distribute the public side widely to enable access where ever you need it. Generating one is easy: ssh-keygen -t dsa Don't Use a Blank Passphrase on Your Key This key is now your identity. Protect it.

3987

Towards a test suite for TOTP codes

Because I'm a massive nerd, I actually try to read specification documents. As I've ranted ad nauseam before, the current TOTP spec is irresponsibly obsolete. The three major implementations of the spec - Google, Apple, and Yubico - all subtly disagree on how it should be implemented. Every other MFA app has their own…