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The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 431 posts.
If you are 17 or under, a federal prosecutor could have charged you with computer hacking just for reading Seventeen magazine online—until today. It’s not because the law got any better. Earlier today, we wrote about news sites that alarmingly prohibit their youth audiences from accessing the news...
I have signed the StopWatching.Us letter today. I am not a US citizen, so even if the letter succeeds, I don’t think my privacy will improve substantially. But at least I did something.
At Open Whisper Systems, we often get emails from people who’d like to donate money to the project. For an OSS project, particularly one that aspires to a collective sense of ownership, handling donations is not always entirely straightforward. The fundamental contradiction is that while donatio...
The public lost another battle in the U.S. v. Aaron Swartz case, this one over transparency. On May 13, 2013, the U.S. District Court judge handling the prosecution sided with the government, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR and refused to make public any information in the case...
Edward Snowden has set up a dead man’s switch. He’s distributed encrypted copies of his document trove to various people, and has set up some sort of automatic system to distribute the key, should something happen to him. Dead man’s switches have a long history, both for safety (the machinery automatically stops if…
The Rails community has had a few high-profile security issues this week. They are well-summarized, with an alarming list of what follow-ons to expect, by Patrick McKenzie: What the Rails Security Issue Means for Your Startup.
Arctic Wolf®, the leader in security operations, has acquired Cylance, a pioneer of AI-based endpoint security.
Play Framework - The High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
This is neat: Here, we describe a new acoustic cryptanalysis key extraction attack, applicable to GnuPG’s current implementation of RSA. The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of…
Thoughts on the death of Ma Ailun According to reports , a woman in China was tragically electrocuted using her iPhone while it was char...
A series of debates, civil disobedience, and cryptographic developments have come to be known as “The Crypto Wars”. Learn how 1Password can help you protect your data.
This is a write-up of how the Syrian Electronic Army hacked The Onion. In summary, they phished Onion employees’ Google Apps accounts via 3 …
Quick summary of my recommendations on compare-by-hash: If you are using compare-by-hash to generate addresses for data that can be supplied by malicious users, you should have a plan to migrate to a new hash every few years. For example, BitTorrent falls into this category, but rsync doesn't. Keep in mind that new…
Anonymity in the real world is very hard In late 2011 Hezbollah rolled up a CIA spy ring in Lebanon. This provides an interesting lesson in CIA …
More Americans disapprove (53%) than approve (37%) of the government program that obtained telephone call logs and Internet communication records. Americans are split on whether leaker Edward Snowden did the right or wrong thing.
The PBS series NOVA , “ Rise of the Drones ,” recently aired a segment detailing the capabilities of a powerful aerial surveillance system known as ARGUS-IS, which is basically a super-high, 1.8 gigapixel resolution camera that can be mounted on a drone. As demonstrated in this clip , the system is capable of…
