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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,762 posts.

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753

How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015)

There have been rumors for years that the NSA can decrypt a significant fraction of encrypted Internet traffic. In 2012, James Bamford published an article quoting anonymous former NSA officials stating that the agency had achieved a “computing breakthrough” that gave them “the ability to crack current public…

762

By default, Signal doesn't recall

Signal Desktop now includes support for a new “Screen security” setting that is designed to help prevent your own computer from capturing screenshots of your Signal chats on Windows. This setting is automatically enabled by default in Signal Desktop on Windows 11. If you’re wondering why we’re on...

763

What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp?

Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to…

764

Standing on our own two feet

Update, July 10, 2023 See our new blog post for details on the September 2024 expiration of the newer ISRG Root X1 cross-sign from IdenTrust. Update, December 21, 2020 Thanks to community feedback and our wonderful partners at IdenTrust, we will be able to continue to offer service without interruption to people using…

766

Compromising OpenWrt Supply Chain

Introduction Hello, I’m RyotaK (@ryotkak ), a security engineer at Flatt Security Inc. A few days ago, I was upgrading my home lab network, and I decided to upgrade the OpenWrt on my router.1 After accessing the LuCI, which is the web interface of OpenWrt, I noticed that there is a section called Attended Sysupgrade…

773

Web scraping for me, but not for thee

by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy There are few, if any, legal domains where hypocrisy is as baked into the ecosystem as it is with web scraping. Some of the biggest companies on earth—including Meta and Microsoft—take aggressive, litigious approaches to...

776

Milestone: 100M Certificates Issued

Let’s Encrypt has reached a milestone: we’ve now issued more than 100,000,000 certificates. This number reflects at least a few things: First, it illustrates the strong demand for our services. We’d like to thank all of the sysadmins, web developers, and everyone else managing servers for prioritizing protecting your…