Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 616 posts.

Security & Privacy
581

Unravelling Konami's Arcade DRM

It’s well known that Konami doesn’t have complex protection on its arcade systems. Programmed World was a fan-made network replacement and update service for Konami arcade games with no support outside of Japan. Nothing of its scale and quality had been seen before, and nothing has been seen since, despite other…

593

Patching Is Hard

There are many news reports of a ransomware worm . Much of the National Health Service in the UK has been hit; so has FedEx . The patch for the flaw exploited by this malware has been out for a while, but many companies haven’t installed it. Naturally, this has prompted a lot of victim-blaming: they should have…

598

WhatsApp Security Vulnerability

Back in March, Rolf Weber wrote about a potential vulnerability in the WhatsApp protocol that would allow Facebook to defeat perfect forward secrecy by forcibly change users’ keys, allowing it—or more likely, the government—to eavesdrop on encrypted messages. It seems that this vulnerability is real: WhatsApp has the…