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The Fining of Black America
We analyzed the cities most likely to generate substantial revenues from fines. The best indicator that a government will levy excessive fines? If a large proportion of the city's citizens are Black.
Topics /
Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 578 posts.
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Rule 41 Proposes to Grant New Hacking Powers to the Government
The government hacking into phones and seizing computers remotely? It’s not the plot of a dystopian blockbuster summer movie. It’s a proposal from an obscure committee that proposes changes to court procedures—and if we do nothing, it will go into effect in December. The proposal comes from the...
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How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control
Credit card fraud can be a huge problem for subscription boxes. Here's how we got our situation under control.
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Introducing CloudFlare Registrar: Designed for Security, Not the Masses
At CloudFlare, we’ve constructed one of the world’s largest networks purpose-built to protect our customers from a wide range of attacks.
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Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails
Yikes, looks like the new version of Outlook 20016 has broken the POP3 implementation. If you are currently using the “leave on server and delete after x days” function, the you should check your account because it seems like that the new Outlook is actually deleting your emails almost immediately after retrieving…
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Reversing the Petya ransomware with constraint solvers
With the advent of anonymous online money transactions (read Bitcoin ) ransomware has become a profitable business in the cybercrime indu...
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Reflections: The ecosystem is moving
At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...
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Tor blocked in Turkey as government cracks down on VPN use
The Turkey Blocks internet censorship watchdog has identified and verified that restrictions on the Tor anonymity network and Tor Browser are now in effect throughout Turkey. Our study indicates that service providers have successfully complied with a government ...
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BinDiff now available for free
Posted by Christian Blichmann, Software Engineer BinDiff is a comparison tool for binary files that helps to quickly find differences and ...
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Wycheproof – Tests that check cryptographic software for known weaknesses
Posted by Daniel Bleichenbacher, Security Engineer and Thai Duong, Security Engineer We’re excited to announce the release of Project Wyche...
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Signal and Giphy
The latest Signal release for Android includes support for GIF search and browsing. Signal has long supported sending and receiving GIFs, but this is an experiment that allows users to browse, search, and select popular GIFs from within Signal.
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Anguish: Invisible Programming Language and Invisible Data Theft
DISCLAIMER: data theft is a serious crime in many jurisdictions. The author does not condone or encourage anyone to break laws. The information provided here is for educational purposes only.
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How to Crash Systemd in One Command
After running this command, PID 1 is hung in the pause system call. You can no longer start and stop daemons. inetd-style services no longer accept connections. You cannot cleanly reboot the system. The system feels generally unstable (e.g. ssh and su hang for 30 seconds since systemd is now integrated with the login…
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Free VPN integrated in Opera for better online privacy
Now, you don't have to download VPN extensions or pay for VPN subscriptions to access blocked websites and to shield your browsing when on public Wi-Fi.
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Syscall Auditing at Scale
If you are are an engineer whose organization uses Linux in production, I have two quick questions for you: 1) How many unique outbound TCP connections have your servers made in the past hour? 2) Which processes and users initiated each of those connections? If you can answer both of these questions, fantastic! You…
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The Basics of Web Application Security
Security is both very important and often under-emphasized. While many targeted techniques help, there are some basic clean code habits which every developer can and should be doing
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Yes, All DRM
Everybody knows that the digital locks of DRM on the digital media you own is a big problem. If you’ve bought a digital book, album, or movie, you should be able to do what you want with it—whether that’s enjoying it wherever you want to, or making it more accessible by changing the font size or...
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Concrete AI Safety Problems
We (along with researchers from Berkeley and Stanford) are co-authors on today’s paper led by Google Brain researchers, Concrete Problems in AI Safety. The paper explores many research problems around ensuring that modern machine learning systems operate as intended.
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Progress Towards 100% HTTPS, June 2016
Our goal with Let’s Encrypt is to get the Web to 100% HTTPS. We’d like to give a quick progress update. Let’s Encrypt has issued more than 5 million certificates in total since we launched to the general public on December 3, 2015. Approximately 3.8 million of those are active, meaning unexpired and unrevoked. Our…
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iOS 10: Security Weakness Discovered, Backup Passwords Much Easier to Break
We discovered a major security flaw in the iOS 10 backup protection mechanism. This security flaw allowed us developing a new attack that is able to bypass cert
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Why I’m not speaking at CPDP: It’s the privacy-washing
13 Jan, 2016 The sponsorship of privacy and human rights conferences by corporations that erode our privacy and human rights is a clear conflict of interests that we must challenge. The revolution will not be sponsored by those we are revolting against.
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Analysis and Exploitation of a Linux Kernel Vulnerability
FortiMail Workspace Security secures user-facing apps from advanced threats that target Email, Browsers, Collaboration Tools and Cloud Storage Apps.
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How your data is collected and commoditised via “free” online services
I get a lot of people popping up with data breaches for Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP). There’s an interesting story in that itself actually, one I must get around to writing in the future as folks come from all sorts of different backgrounds and offer
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Thomas Jefferson and Apple versus the FBI
When Prohibition began, anti-alcohol crusaders demanded that the St. Louis Public Library burn every book that explained "the home production of alcohol for drinks". The librarian insisted on keeping the books but agreed to hide them from the "general public".
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Why I stopped using StartSSL (Hint: it involves a Chinese company)
StartSSL uses https://auth.startssl.com/ for the front-end to access to their PKIs (login to the PKI, create, revoke certificates...). It's the Core of their service and the critical part of their infrastructure.