Best of 2021

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

Security & Privacy
163

Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites (2019)

Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of…

170

Remote code execution in Homebrew by compromising the official Cask repository

この記事は日本語でも投稿されています: https://blog.ryotak.net/post/homebrew-security-incident/ (もし日本語が読める場合、筆者は英語がそこまで得意ではないため、日本語の記事を読むことをお勧めします。) (Official blog post about this incident is available here: https://brew.sh/2021/04/21/security-incident-disclosure/) Preface Homebrew project is running a “Vulnerability Disclosure Program”…

177

Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags

Complex software is, to put it mildly, hard to get right (for details, see almost any other posting on this or any other security blog). Especially for gadgets that are rich with microphones, cameras, location and environmental sensors, and communication links (such as, you know, smartphones), errors and security…