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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 579 posts.

2019
32

Airbnb and security camera disclosure

This post got *a lot* of attention. I’m super happy about that because I had been afraid that we had reached a point where we collectively didn’t care about cameras or meaningful disclosure. Although, to that point here’s a comment someone posted: "I just assume that there will be camera constantly recording when I…

36

WARP is here

Today, after a longer than expected wait, we're opening WARP and WARP+ to the general public. If you haven’t heard about it yet, WARP is a mobile app designed for everyone which uses our global network to secure all of your phone’s Internet traffic.

38

Camera and microphone require HTTPS in Firefox 68

As of Firefox 68—releasing next week—camera and microphone will require an https connection to work. Access from insecure http will cease to work, matching how Chrome works. Camera and microhone are powerful features, and Firefox will now only expose them in secure contexts, a security and privacy improvement. Largely…

44

Setting up a home VPN server with WireGuard

Motivation For a moderately security conscious geek like myself, there can be a number of reasons to want to set up a home VPN server: Accessing your home computer via screen sharing without exposing it to the Internet (and thereby to potential evil-doers). Accessing servers with IP white lists (common case for…

45

Sinkholed

On 26 Nov 2019 at 14:55 UTC, I logged into my server that hosts my website to perform a simple maintenance activity. Merely three minutes later, at 14:58 UTC, the domain name susam.in used to host this website was transferred to another registrant without any authorisation by me or without any notification sent to me…

55

NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)

Before the US crypto export regulations were finally disolved the export version of Lotus Notes used to include a key escrow / backdoor feature called differential cryptography. The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA's public key. The NSA would then…