Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 612 posts.

Security & Privacy
244

‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang

‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang. What’s the problem? The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority1 citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs…

267

Swift Crypto

I’m thrilled to announce a new open-source project for the Swift ecosystem, Swift Crypto. Swift Crypto is a new Swift package that brings the fantastic APIs of Apple CryptoKit to the wider Swift community. This will allow Swift developers, regardless of the platform on which they deploy their applications, to access…

268

Whose Computer Is It?

Patrick Wardle highlighted a tweet by Maxwell (" Some Apple apps bypass some network extensions and VPN Apps. Maps for example can directly access the internet bypassing any NEFilterDataProvider or NEAppProxyProviders you have running "), sparking an extensive HN discussion on Apple's ham-fisted tactics (not unlike…