Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 300 posts.

Security & Privacy
122

How Equifax Was Breached in 2017

On a Saturday night, a security engineer at Equifax was updating an SSL certificate on a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Immediately after, suspicious connections were detected. After a more in-depth investigation, it became evident that the situation was far graver than anticipated. A service had to be…

133

Private and Public Mastodon

Here’s how to get into a lot of trouble: Suppose you (like me) love the intellectual wealth found in free-form text on the Internet. And (like me) are a reasonably competent programmer. And (like me) have derived value and pleasure searching Twitter. And (like me) you look at this nifty new Fediverse thing and see…

139

Passkeys: A Loss of User Control?

This blog post doesn't have the answers. I'm trying to learn about passkeys, but I don't claim to be an expert. I do have a lot of questions, especially for Apple, because I'm an Apple user and developer. According to Betteridge's law of headlines , "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the…