Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,333 posts.

Security & Privacy
Any year
1508

Suicide Linux

You know how sometimes if you mistype a filename in Bash, it corrects your spelling and runs the command anyway?* Such as when changing directory, or opening a file. I have an idea: Suicide Linux. Any time - any time - you type any remotely incorrect command, the interpreter cr...

1520

Anatomy of a Scam

There is a lot of material about the not-so-nice VCs who take advantage of young and inexperienced founders. But the reverse also happens, founders that try to get money out of VCs for projects that have zero chance of every coming to fruit. Or worse still, founders that pretend to have something on the go when they…

1521

The woes of sanitizing SVGs

Scratch has a long history of SVG-related vulnerabilities. The source of these is that Scratch parses user-generated (ie. attacker-controlled) content into an <svg> element and appends it into the main document for various operations (eg. measuring SVG bounding box in a more reliable way than viewbox or width/height).

1525

CPU Backdoors

It's generally accepted that any piece of software could be compromised with a backdoor. Prominent examples include the Sony/BMG installer , which had a backdoor built-in to allow Sony to keep users from copying the CD, which also allowed malicious third-parties to take over any machine with the software installed…