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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 578 posts.

2016
481

MitM-ing Postgres

I recently had to set up a new postgres instance at work. While we’re already using Heroku Postgres for production loads, we had some requirements for this one that couldn’t be solved without being database admin, and thus had to go self-hosted. That...

489

How I got tech support scammers infected with Locky

There’s been this debate for a while now, about AI being either the greatest or the worst or maybe the least interesting thing to happen to humanity so far. I have to say I’m not 100% sure where I land on this one myself. AI has empowered me to do things I had been putting off forever, multiplied my productivity and…

493

Security Risks of TSA PreCheck

Former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley wrote an op-ed pointing out the security vulnerabilities in the TSA’s PreCheck program: The first vulnerability in the system is its enrollment process, which seeks to verify an applicant’s identity. We know verification is a challenge: A 2011 Government Accountability Office report…

501

License update

Signal Protocol is a modern, open source, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems. We use Signal Protocol as the foundation for our own private messaging app, Signal, but also make Signal Protocol libraries available for other applications to use. Our Signal Protocol librar...

502

Hardening Compiler Flags for NixOS

In the past year some Mayflower colleagues have started using and contributing to NixOS, a purely functional GNU/Linux distribution that combines package and configuration management. We decided that we would give it a try in production but stumbled upon some issues that had to be resolved first. We have added new…

504

PlayStation Vita Exploit Reverse Engineering Challenge

We released HENkaku a week ago and were blown away by the reception. There has been over 25k unique installs and every day new homebrew are being announced. This is all thanks to those who contributed to the SDK project back when Rejuvenate was announced. Without a working toolchain for developers and a couple of…