Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 348 posts.

Security & Privacy
61

An Update on Firefox Containers

Containers is now available as a Firefox Extension, accessible to all Firefox users. Download Firefox Multi-Account Containers here. Back in June 2016, we started experimenting with “Containers” as a way to explore Contextual Identities on the web. Firefox Containers are a way for users to isolate their online…

68

AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

For 3 years AdNauseam has been used by tens of thousands of Chrome, Firefox and Opera users, who oppose the unethical surveillance advertising model. Now Google banned it from its Web Store on very dubious charges. Furthermore Google locked AdNauseam users out of their ad data. Today it's your privacy tool, tomorrow…

70

Toward a Reasonably Secure Laptop

It’s no secret that hardware selection is one of the biggest hurdles Qubes users face. Finding a computer that is secure, trustworthy, and compatible is more difficult than it should be. In an effort to address the compatibility aspect of that problem, we introduced the Qubes-certified ...

80

Saved by Alice

In Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court ruled that an abstract idea does not become eligible for a patent simply by being implemented on a generic computer. This 2014 decision has significantly reduced the harm caused by vague and overbroad software patents. Before Alice, patent owners who had...