Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 678 posts.

Security & Privacy
548

How to exfiltrate code from Bitbucket

Every year or so, something compels me to start over with a fresh OS image. Most recently, that something was an unfortunate water bottle incident. Once again, I need to pull down my digital life from the internet. The code and assets for this blog currently live in a 500 MB Git repository, which was hosted on…

563

No U PNP

Previously on Deep Space Nine, we discussed (read: I complained about) the short life and quick death of DLNA. On the way, I mentioned DLNA's dependence on UPnP as an underlying autoconfiguration protocol. Let's talk a bit more about UPnP, because it's 1) an interesting protocol, 2) widely misunderstood, and 3)…

566

Why Isn’t Telegram End-to-End Encrypted by Default (2017)

I've been getting this question more often this year. It's based on the wrong assumption that some other popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp are "end-to-end encrypted by default", while Telegram is not. This post is intended to disprove this myth that has been so carefully crafted by Facebook/WhatsApp marketing…

570

Implant.ARM.iLOBleed.a

HP servers provide a management module called iLO (a.k.a. Integrated Lights-Out), which turns on as soon as the power cable is connected, loading a full-blown proprietary operating system. This module has full access to all the firmware, hardware, software, and operating system installed on the server. In addition to…