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
4027

Domain hacks with unusual Unicode characters

Unicode contains a range of symbols which don't get much use. For example, there are separate symbols for TradeMark - ™, Service Mark - ℠, and Prescriptions - ℞. Nestling among the "Letterlike Symbols" are two curious entries. Both of these are single characters: Telephone symbol - ℡ Numero Sign - № What's interesting…

4030

Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

Few weeks ago, the German political magazine Panorama and STRG_F reported that law enforcement agencies infiltrated the Tor network in order to expose criminals. The reporters had access to documents showing four successful deanonymizations. I was given the chance to review some documents. In this post, I am…

4034

Root a Mac in 10 seconds or less

Often times, physical access to a machine means game over. While people like to think that OSX is immune to most security threats, even Apple computers can be susceptible to physical attacks. Mac OSX is capable of booting into single user mode by holding a special key combination (Command-S). From this point, an…

4035

The Information Apocalypse (2018)

My friend Aviv was recently the subject of a popular Buzzfeed article about the possibility of an impending “information apocalypse”. tl;dr: Aviv extrapolates from the fake news crisis that started in 2016 to a world in which anyone can create AI-assisted misinformation campaigns indistinguishable from reality to the…

4044

Unravelling Konami's Arcade DRM

It’s well known that Konami doesn’t have complex protection on its arcade systems. Programmed World was a fan-made network replacement and update service for Konami arcade games with no support outside of Japan. Nothing of its scale and quality had been seen before, and nothing has been seen since, despite other…