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Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,772 posts.
What does a PGP signature on a Git commit prove?
With git, a cryptographic signature on a commit provides strong integrity guarantees of the entire history of that branch going backwards...
The UK "Porn" Filter Blocks Kids' Access To Tech, Civil Liberties Websites
It fell to the UK Tories to actually implement the Nanny State. Too bad Nanny Tory does not want kinds to read up on tech web sites, or civi...
Decompiling 2024: A Year of Resurgance in Decompilation Research
The year 2024 was a resurgent year for decompilation. Academic publications from that year made up nearly 30% of all top publications ever made in decompilation. In this post, I do a summarization and retrospective of both the academic and ideological progress of decompilation in 2024. Hint: decompilation research is…
Malicious remote code execution backdoor discovered bootstrap-sass Ruby gem
On March 26, 2019, a malicious version of the popular bootstrap-sass package, that has been downloaded a total of 28 million times to date, was published to the official RubyGems repository.
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…
DigiNotar root CA trust removal follow-up
Earlier this week we revoked our trust in the DigiNotar certificate authority from all Mozilla software. This is not a temporary suspension, it is a complete removal from our trusted ...
Warrantless encryption is a first amendment issue
Encryption is privacy incarnate – don’t ban it
MIT Media Lab's concerns about the cryptocurrency IOTA
On Friday, MIT Technology Review published an article on the cryptocurrency IOTA. However, we at the Media Lab have issues with the story
Improving your online privacy: An update
Ten years ago, after it became clear to almost everyone that all our online activity was being tracked and stored, I wrote a blog post about simple steps a person could take to improve their privacy online .
Tailscale Authentication for Nginx
Use Tailscale's nginx-auth for secure Single Sign-On (SSO) to internal services, reducing the need for internal account systems.
The New USA Freedom Act: A Step in the Right Direction, but More Must Be Done
A bipartisan group of congressional leaders has reintroduced the USA Freedom Act. The bill is an attempt to rein in the intelligence community's "Collect It All" strategy, and passing USA Freedom is a first, small step in the right direction. However, it has serious faults that should be addressed...
Breaches, traders, plain text passwords, ethical disclosure and 000webhost
It’s a bit hard to even know where to begin with this one, perhaps at the start and then I’ll try and piece all the bits together as best I can. As you may already know if you’re familiar with this blog, I run the service Have
Acronis True Image costs performance when not used
Over two years ago I installed Acronis True Image for Crucial in order to migrate my data to a new SSD I had just purchased. It worked. I then left True Image installed “just in case”, and what har…
DEF CON and Stack Overflow: What Our Traffic Says About Cybersecurity
Stack Overflow traffic during DEF CON shows what technologies are trending in the hacker community
EFF to UN: You Need a Privacy Watchdog
EFF joined more than sixty civil liberties organizations and public interest groups from across the world yesterday in calling upon the world's governments to support the creation of a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy. The special rapporteurs are independent experts...
BlackCat ransomware group implodes after apparent payment by Change Healthcare
There are indications that U.S. healthcare giant Change Healthcare has made a $22 million extortion payment to the infamous BlackCat ransomware group (a.k.a. “ ALPHV “) as the company struggles to bring services back online amid a cyberattack that has disrupted prescription drug services nationwide for weeks. However…