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The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 94 posts.
by John Perry Barlow Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.We have no elected...
For as long as I remember, HTTP cookies have been vilified as a grave threat to the privacy of online browsing. I don't quite agree, but I f...
hacking Amazon with a book, Amazon stallowned, stored XSS
Part 1: Finding the rootkit It's monday morning and I am for coffee in downtown Thessaloniki, a partner calls: - On machine XXX mysqld is not starting since Saturday. - Can I drink my coffee and come over later to check it ? Is it critical ? - Nope, come over anytime you can... Around
I’ve written a lot on the “War on Photography,” where normal people are harassed as potential terrorists for taking pictures of things in public. This article is different; it’s about recording the police: Allison’s predicament is an extreme example of a growing and disturbing trend. As citizens increase their…
Don't talk to the cops about any significant crime ...ESPECIALLY if you're innocent. Here's why.
So, when I read that Assassin's Creed 2 for the PC would fight piracy by requiring a live internet connection all the time when you were pla...
Pictured below is what’s known as a skimmer, or a device made to be affixed to the mouth of an ATM and secretly swipe credit and debit card information when bank customers slip their cards into the machines to pull out money. Skimmers have been around for years, of course, but thieves are constantly improving them…
Here's my advice on password security based on the collected opinions of others: 1. Write them down and keep them in your wallet because you...
At a security conference recently, the moderator asked the panel of distinguished cybersecurity leaders what their nightmare scenario was. The answers were the predictable array of large-scale attacks: against our communications infrastructure, against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination with…
There’s really no such thing as security in the abstract. Security can only be defined in relation to something else. You’re secure from something or against something. In the next 10 years, the traditional definition of IT security—that it protects you from hackers, criminals, and other bad guys—will undergo a…
Building secure systems is difficult. It would be nice if we had a bunch of well-designed crypto building blocks that we could assemble in all sorts of ways and be certain that they would, no matte…
I just had a very disturbing conversation with a Rackspace Cloud CSR. It went something like this: CSR: Can I have your account user name a...
DuckDuckGo didn't log IPs, but favicons loaded from Amazon S3 leaked every search term in the Referer header. It was fixed two days after I posted.
I’ve been playing around with the Text CAPTCHA demo page and wondered how well WolframAlpha is at logic questions. As it turns out, Wolfram is pretty smart! Although, since a CAPTCHA requir…
My new bank, Ally Bank , configures a security question and answer for customer service calls. In addition to your SSN, date of birth, and mother's maiden name they also ask you the question you specify and wait for the answer you've provided. This is good, because many standard questions are…
