Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,768 posts.

Security & Privacy
Any year
694

The xz attack shell script

Andres Freund published the existence of the xz attack on 2024-03-29 to the public oss-security@openwall mailing list. The day before, he alerted Debian security and the (private) distros@openwall list. In his mail, he says that he dug into this after “observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz…

698

Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

Update, April 9, 2021 : We've launched Am I FLoCed, a new site that will tell you whether your Chrome browser has been turned into a guinea pig for Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, Google’s latest targeted advertising experiment. The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create...

702

Blur Tools for Signal

Right now, people around the world are marching and protesting against racism and police brutality, outraged by the most recent police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. At Signal, we support the people who have gone into the streets to make their voices heard. We believe that something ...

704

ProctorU is dystopian spyware

As part of my MSc, I have to take an online exam. Obviously, this means I am highly likely to cheat by looking up things on Wikipedia or by having a bit of paper with notes on it. EVIL! So, the exam body requires me to install ProctorU. It's a service which lets someone watch you through your laptop camera while you…