Best of 2013

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2013. 236 posts.

Security & Privacy
216

Is Unicode Safe?

Unicode is just too complex to ever be secure.  — Bruce Schneier, 2000 Over the last 25 years Unicode has succeeded. It hasn't displaced all other character encodings, but it's clearly on its way there. It's supported widely enough that it's a compatible choice, new projects use it, and it's becoming the…

217

Nice Security Mindset Example

A real-world one-way function: Alice and Bob procure the same edition of the white pages book for a particular town, say Cambridge. For each letter Alice wants to encrypt, she finds a person in the book whose last name starts with this letter and uses his/her phone number as the encryption of that letter. To decrypt…

224

NSA E-Mail Eavesdropping

More Snowden documents analyzed by the Guardian—two articles—discuss how the NSA collected e-mails and data on Internet activity of both Americans and foreigners. The program might have ended in 2011, or it might have continued under a different name. This is the program that resulted in that bizarre tale of Bush…

230

The Factoring Cryptopocalypse

The key detail to understand about the work in the Joux papers is that it is limited to solving discrete logarithm problems over fields of small characteristic . As interesting as the work is, mathematically, it should not be a great surprise to cryptographers: We've known for over a decade that small-characteristic…

236

Comcast caught hijacking web traffic

On November 20th, 2012 Comcast hijacked my HTTP traffic and re-routed it through their own servers, injecting a “notice” on the page before completing the request. What this means is instead of my web request being routed to the website I wanted to visit, Comcast took it upon themselves to hijack my web…