Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 279 posts.

Security & Privacy
93

EC2's most dangerous feature

A review for readers unfamiliar with this feature: Amazon IAM ( Identity and Access Management ) is a service which allows for the creation of access credentials which are limited in scope; for example, you can have keys which can read objects from Amazon S3 but cannot write any objects. IAM Roles for EC2 are a…

110

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…