Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 579 posts.

Security & Privacy
241

Tor Browser 9.0

We want everyone in the world to be able to enjoy the privacy and freedom online Tor provides, and that's why over the past couple years, we've been working hard to boost our UX and localization efforts, with the biggest gains first visible in Tor Browser 8.0. In Tor Browser 9.0, we continue to build upon those…

247

A problem worse than Zoom?

On macOS, an app can register to handle URL schemes. Web browsers such as Safari, Chrome, and Firefox register to handle the schemes for web pages, http or https . Non-browser apps may register to handle other URL schemes; for example, an email client may register to handle the well known mailto scheme. When a URL is…

256

Still Why No HTTPS?

Back in July last year, Scott Helme and I shipped a little pet project that tracked the world's largest websites not implementing HTTPS by default [https://www.troyhunt.com/why-no-https-heres-the-worlds-largest-websites-not-redirecting-insecure-requests/] . We called it Why No HTTPS? [https://whynohttps.

258

The Myth of Consumer-Grade Security

The Department of Justice wants access to encrypted consumer devices but promises not to infiltrate business products or affect critical infrastructure. Yet that’s not possible, because there is no longer any difference between those categories of devices. Consumer devices are critical infrastructure. They affect…

263

Learning from OpenBSD can make computers marginally less horrible

The following document is an attempt to consolidate down a number of threads spanning separate discussions from around the 'net I have been having on the subject of operating system development models and OpenBSD. I will break up this document into several sections each of which will handle separate pillars of my…