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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 195 posts.

2013
101

Android RNG Weakness Renders Bitcoin Wallets Insecure

We recently learned that a component of Android responsible for generating secure random numbers contains critical weaknesses , that render all Android wallets generated to date vulnerable to theft. Because the problem lies with Android itself, this problem will affect you if you have a wallet generated by any Android…

110

The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003

Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]

115

Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

The PBS series NOVA , “ Rise of the Drones ,” recently aired a segment detailing the capabilities of a powerful aerial surveillance system known as ARGUS-IS, which is basically a super-high, 1.8 gigapixel resolution camera that can be mounted on a drone. As demonstrated in this clip , the system is capable of…

118

Documents Shed Light on Border Laptop Searches

The case of David Miranda got a lot of attention around the world after UK authorities were accused of abusing an anti-terrorism law to evade the normal constitutional restrains on police power and question someone because of their political associations. Well, a very similar abuse of power appears to have happened…

119

TextSecure, Now With 10 Million More Users

At Open Whisper Systems, we’re working to both advance the state of the art for secure communication and also reduce the friction required for ordinary people to make use of it. We want everyone to have access to advanced secure communication methods that are as easy and reliable to use as makin...

120

A Court Order is an Insider Attack

Commentators on the Lavabit case, including the judge himself, have criticized Lavabit for designing its system in a way that resisted court-ordered access to user data. They ask: If court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access? The…