Security
The Free Software Foundation launched the Librephone initiative in October 2025, aiming to produce the world's first fully open smartphone at both hardware and software levels. With Google and Apple tightening their grip on mobile platforms through proprietary firmware and mandatory identity verification, genuinely free mobile operating systems have never been more urgent.
Security
An analysis of a 500 GB data leak related to China's Great Firewall, revealing its architecture, components like Cyber Narrator and TSG Galaxy, and how the technology is exported to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar.
Security
A security researcher discovers that a clothing store's gift card system uses sequential numbering with no rate limiting, allowing him to find 177,000 rubles worth of unused gift cards in just 5 minutes of brute-forcing.
Security
The FBI secretly built and operated Anom, an encrypted messaging platform marketed to criminal organizations, intercepting 27 million messages across 45 languages over three years before executing coordinated raids in 16 countries that led to over 800 arrests.
Security
A mysterious creator seeded 256 Bitcoin wallets with private keys of increasing difficulty, challenging the world to crack them. A decade later, the puzzle has become a landmark experiment in cryptographic security — with over 916 BTC still unclaimed and solvers pushing the boundaries of brute-force and probabilistic algorithms.
Security
A Man-in-the-Middle attack on jabber.ru in 2023 exposed a systemic gap in TLS certificate issuance that affects millions of websites. Cloudflare's Universal SSL still does not implement RFC 8657 protections — and actively prevents users from doing so themselves.
Security
A security researcher discovers a vulnerability in Google's username recovery form that allows brute-forcing the phone number of any Google user using IPv6 rotation and BotGuard token reuse, earning a $5,000 bug bounty.
Security
A detailed packet-capture analysis of Telegram's MTProto 2 protocol reveals that every message carries a cleartext 64-bit device identifier — auth_key_id — that persists across sessions, IP changes, and even Tor connections, enabling global tracking of any user by anyone who can observe Telegram's network traffic.
Security
A security researcher built a system to scan thousands of public GitHub repositories, recovering deleted files from Git history to find leaked API keys and tokens, earning over $64,000 in bug bounties.
Security
A university programmer recounts how a harmless April Fools' hack -- changing every campus printer's display to 'INSERT 5 CENTS' -- spiraled into an HR crisis that nearly cost him his job.
Security
Researchers scanning 2.25 million Russian-zone domains discovered that 3,320 websites had publicly accessible Subversion (.svn) metadata directories, exposing complete application source code including that of Yandex, Mail.ru, and Rambler. The fix is straightforward but the scale of exposure is alarming.