Best of 2024

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

Security & Privacy
9

Jailbreaking RabbitOS

Critics unanimously agree that it sucks , and some have accused the company of deliberate deception . Rabbit Inc. reportedly accepts returns, but customers are so eager to get rid of their R1s that even new-in-box units are selling for well below RRP ($200) on secondary markets.

12

Timeline of the xz open source attack

Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library, eventually being granted commit access and maintainership. Using that access, they installed a very subtle, carefully hidden backdoor into liblzma, a part of xz that also…

22

Our audit of Homebrew

This is a joint post with the Homebrew maintainers; read their announcement here! Last summer, we performed an audit of Homebrew. Our audit’s scope included Homebrew/brew itself (home of the brew CLI), and three adjacent repositories responsible for various security-relevant aspects of Homebrew’s operation…

28

Is Tor still safe to use?

This blog post is a response to an investigative news report about a large-scale law-enforcement attack that managed to de-anonymize a user of an old version of the long-retired app Ricochet. This blog post aims to provide insight into what we know so far. Nothing that the Tor Project has learned about this incident…