Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 578 posts.

Security & Privacy
220

Reflections: The ecosystem is moving

At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...

224

Signal and Giphy

The latest Signal release for Android includes support for GIF search and browsing. Signal has long supported sending and receiving GIFs, but this is an experiment that allows users to browse, search, and select popular GIFs from within Signal.

227

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…

229

Syscall Auditing at Scale

If you are are an engineer whose organization uses Linux in production, I have two quick questions for you: 1) How many unique outbound TCP connections have your servers made in the past hour? 2) Which processes and users initiated each of those connections? If you can answer both of these questions, fantastic! You…

231

Yes, All DRM

Everybody knows that the digital locks of DRM on the digital media you own is a big problem. If you’ve bought a digital book, album, or movie, you should be able to do what you want with it—whether that’s enjoying it wherever you want to, or making it more accessible by changing the font size or...