Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 204 posts.

Security & Privacy
65

Free Your Android

After all the recent NSA revelations, it's been even more important to use Free Software on our mobile phones. Let me express this in another way: We should be very careful about what software we use on a device that is always on and in our pocket 24h a day. Starting from the very basic thing tha...

71

Yik Yak Hack

Yik Yak is an anonymous, controversial social media application that allows people to make posts that are visible to other users within ~2 miles. Often landing a top 10 spot in the iOS App Store, this app has become increasingly popular with high school and college students. Due to the anonymous nature of the app…

75

Tarsnap: No heartbleed here

There's a few reasons for this. First, the Tarsnap client-server protocol does not use TLS; instead, it uses a protocol which is about 100x simpler (in terms of the number of pages of documentation required to define it). This means there's less code and far fewer edge cases where bugs can lurk without being triggered…