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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 431 posts.

2013
275

Worthless security claims

I’ve been considering purchasing one of these t-shirts: This shirt would announce to everyone who crosses my path that I am, in fact, the world’s greatest lover. They would know this because I have a t-shirt that tells them so and it would give them enormous

277

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…

278

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...

279

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…

280

Surveillance and the Internet of Things

The Internet has turned into a massive surveillance tool. We’re constantly monitored on the Internet by hundreds of companies—both familiar and unfamiliar. Everything we do there is recorded, collected, and collated—sometimes by corporations wanting to sell us stuff and sometimes by governments wanting to keep an eye…

281

Geohot presents an evasi0n7 writeup

Hi, I'm on a plane from SFO to New York, and made something for you. Not even a rap song. ******* geohot( @tomcr00se ) presents an evasi0n7 writeup ******* == Intro == I was bored, reversed, wrote this write-up, and wanted to do something with it. I tried to sell it to the Chinese for $7 and a trip to the Pizza Hut…

283

Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media. My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I’ll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways…

289

Can I Be Trusted?

Slashdot asks the question: I’m a big fan of Bruce Schneier, but just to play devil’s advocate, let’s say, hypothetically, that Schneier is actually in cahoots with the NSA. Who better to reinstate public trust in weakened cryptosystems? As an exercise in security that Schneier himself may find interesting, what…

300

Detaining David Miranda

Last Sunday, David Miranda was detained while changing planes at London Heathrow Airport by British authorities for nine hours under a controversial British law—the maximum time allowable without making an arrest. There has been much made of the fact that he’s the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter whom…