Best of 2016

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

Security & Privacy
163

What Is the Secure Enclave?

The big tech news this week is that the FBI is trying to force Apple to unlock a suspect's iPhone. One of the interesting points around this story is that the iPhone in question is an older one, an iPhone 5c. Newer phones have what Apple calls the Secure Enclave, which some say protects against requests of this…

164

Something Secret This Way Comes

On the Rust Lint Workshop, I started coding on a “secret” project (Actually I hinted at the possibility during our 100 clippy lints celebration). Now that I’ve built a prototype, it’s time to spill the beans: I wrote a new lint. One might even say a new type of lint. One of the interesting things about this lint is…

172

The NSA Is Hoarding Vulnerabilities

The National Security Agency is lying to us. We know that because data stolen from an NSA server was dumped on the Internet. The agency is hoarding information about security vulnerabilities in the products you use, because it wants to use it to hack others’ computers. Those vulnerabilities aren’t being reported, and…