Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,334 posts.

Security & Privacy
Any year
1746

SHA-3 to Be Announced

NIST is about to announce the new hash algorithm that will become SHA-3. This is the result of a six-year competition, and my own Skein is one of the five remaining finalists (out of an initial 64). It’s probably too late for me to affect the final decision, but I am hoping for “no award.” It’s not that the new hash…

1750

Free Your Android

After all the recent NSA revelations, it's been even more important to use Free Software on our mobile phones. Let me express this in another way: We should be very careful about what software we use on a device that is always on and in our pocket 24h a day. Starting from the very basic thing tha...

1761

Maybe Skip SHA-3

In 2005 and 2006, a series of significant results were published against SHA-1 [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ]. These repeated break-throughs caused something of a crisis of faith as cryptographers questioned whether we knew how to build hash functions at all. After all, many hash functions from the 1990's had not aged well [ 1 ][ 2…

1762

Whose Computer Is It?

Patrick Wardle highlighted a tweet by Maxwell (" Some Apple apps bypass some network extensions and VPN Apps. Maps for example can directly access the internet bypassing any NEFilterDataProvider or NEAppProxyProviders you have running "), sparking an extensive HN discussion on Apple's ham-fisted tactics (not unlike…

1768

OnionShare 2 adds anonymous dropboxes

After nearly a year of work from a growing community of developers, designers, and translators, I'm excited that OnionShare 2 is finally ready. You can download it from onionshare.org. OnionShare is an open source tool for securely and anonymously sending and receiving files using Tor onion services. It