Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 240 posts.

Security & Privacy
63

Twitter's Secret “Guest Mode”

Twitter has an undocumented feature which lets you follow accounts without being logged in. Here's how I found it, and how you can use it. My crappy old TV has a crappy old web browser on it. One boring Sunday, I decided to see which websites worked and which didn't on a 6 year old browser. Anything using LetsEncrypt…

66

TLS 1.3 and Proxies

I'll generally ignore the internet froth in a given week as much as possible, but when Her Majesty's Government starts repeating misunderstandings about TLS 1.3 it is necessary to write something, if only to have a pointer ready for when people start citing it as evidence.

79

Demystifying CORS

CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) is subject tinged with dread for many web developers. Like tales of a mythical sea beast, every developer has a story to tell about the day CORS seized upon one of their web requests, dragging it down into the inexorable depths, never to be seen again.