Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 293 posts.

Security & Privacy
289

GPG and Me (2015)

I receive a fair amount of email from strangers. My email address is public, which doesn’t seemto be a popular choice these days, but I’ve received enough inspiring correspondence over the yearsto leave it be.When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the fee...

292

Android | Madaidan's Insecurities

By default, Android has a strong security model and incorporates full system SELinux policies , strong app sandboxing , full verified boot , modern exploit mitigations like fine-grained, forward-edge Control Flow Integrity and ShadowCallStack , widespread use of memory-safe languages (Java / Kotlin) and more. As such…

293

Firefox and Chromium

Firefox is sometimes recommended as a supposedly more secure browser because of its parent company's privacy practices. This article explains why this notion is not true and enumerates a number of security weaknesses in Firefox's security model when compared to Chromium. In particular, it covers the less granular…