Best of 2024

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2024. 536 posts.

Security & Privacy
189

IPMI

I am making steady progress towards moving the Computers Are Bad enterprise cloud to its new home, here in New Mexico. One of the steps in this process is, of course, purchasing a new server... the current Big Iron is getting rather old (probably about a decade!) and here in town I'll have the rack space for more…

190

Apple curl security incident 12604

tldr: Apple thinks it is fine. I do not. On December 28 2023, bugreport 12604 was filed in the curl issue tracker. We get a lot issues filed most days so this fact alone was hardly anything out of the ordinary. We read the reports, investigate, ask follow-up questions to see what we can learn … Continue reading the…

194

My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

A few years ago, my cat gave me my most memorable middle of the night software engineering incident. I was working at a startup, and we didn’t have a formal on-call rotation yet. That was a deliberate decision, since being on-call is painful, and the team was good about just collectively keeping an eye out for urgent…

199

Make your electronics tamper-evident

If the police ever have physical access to an electronic device like a laptop, even for five minutes , they can install hardware keyloggers, create images of the storage media, or otherwise trivially compromise it at the hardware, firmware, or software level. One way to minimize this risk is to make devices…