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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 556 posts.

2018
272

Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability

There is a lot of righteous anger directed toward Intel over CPU bugs that were revealed by Spectre/Meltdown. I agree that things could have been handled better, particularly with regards to transparency and the sharing of information among the relevant user communities that could have worked together to deploy…

281

Three Charged in Fatal Kansas ‘Swatting’ Attack

Federal prosecutors have charged three men with carrying out a deadly hoax known as “swatting,” in which perpetrators call or message a target’s local 911 operators claiming a fake hostage situation or a bomb threat in progress at the target’s address — with the expectation that local police may respond to the scene…

283

An Update on AMD Processor Security

The AMD Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is the focal point for reporting potential product security issues to AMD. AMD PSIRT works with both the AMD internal product security team and the external product security ecosystem, including security researchers, industry peers, government organizations…

284

Protecting Against HSTS Abuse

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a security standard that provides a mechanism for web sites to declare themselves accessible only via secure connections, and to tell web browsers where to go to get that secure version.

291

The 600+ Companies PayPal Shares Your Data With

One of the effects of GDPR—the new EU General Data Protection Regulation—is that we’re all going to be learning a lot more about who collects our data and what they do with it. Consider PayPal, that just released a list of over 600 companies they share customer data with. Here’s a good visualization of that data. Is…

295

Extended Validation Certificates Are Dead

That's it - I'm calling it - extended validation certificates are dead. Sure, you can still buy them (and there are companies out there that would just love to sell them to you!), but their usefulness has now descended from "barely there" to "as good as non-existent". This change

299

Qubes Air: Generalizing the Qubes Architecture

The Qubes OS project has been around for nearly 8 years now, since its original announcement back in April 2010 (and the actual origin date can be traced back to November 11th, 2009, when an initial email introducing this project was sent within ITL internally). Over these years Qubes h...