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
215

What happened to the Snowden archive

The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it…

219

Swing VPN app is a DDoS botnet

tldr: Swing VPN is using its user base to DDOS sites using its users as a an attack botnet. Introduction It all started with a friend of mine complaining that his phone was doing a request to a specific app every few seconds. Initial assumption was that the phone was infected with a virus but a 2 minute investigation…

222

Don't touch my clipboard

Looking for an em dash I was recently trying to find an em dash character to use in a piece of writing. Since I don’t have the shortcut memorized—for future reference, shift+option+minus on Mac—I did a quick search for it. I didn’t see one on the search results page to copy, so I clicked into the first result: “The…

239

Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability

yes, as in singular one. Back in April 2026 Anthropic caused a lot of media noise when they concluded that their new AI model Mythos is dangerously good at finding security flaws in source code. Apparently Mythos was so good at this that Anthropic would not release this model to the public yet but instead … Continue…