Top all-time · #2511
Alec Muffett
Personal blog · alecmuffett.com/blogsecuritypoliticsai
Alec Muffett writes Dropsafe, a personal blog at alecmuffett.com about security, politics and ai. Since 2020, 30 different Hacker News readers have linked it 46 times, most often “Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alec Muffett's posts as sources on encryption, privacy and platform moderation, including Twitter's Tor onion service and Meta's end-to-end encryption. Comments mostly cite them rather than praise them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
by Alec Muffett
Most-linked posts?
- Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-03-09
- /article/159022 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-18
- Experts criticise EU for certificate proposal that enables spying on HTTPS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-11-02
- On Public Messages, Private Messages and End-to-End Encryption2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-26
- Leaving Facebook Engineering in 20162 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-25
What Hacker News says?
Confusingly, perhaps intentionally so, it's a global number, not a UK one. Details here. https://alecmuffett.com/article/15902 Disclosure: I wrote the blogpost.
Comment linking /article/15902
on “No Place to Hide – U.K. campaign against end-to-encryption encryption”Submitted 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence as a story · 467 points
HN discussion> let's assume it's accurate. This article tries to understand where that number comes from (and fails to do so): https://alecmuffett.com/article/15902
Comment linking /article/15902
on “No Place to Hide – U.K. campaign against end-to-encryption encryption”Submitted UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16 as a story · 394 points
HN discussionAuthor of original blogpost here; I am seeing a lot of discussion here about "what constitutes a public group?" and so I wrote this to help with the discussion. https://alecmuffett.com/article/15095
Comment linking /article/15095
on “My interview with Steven Levy re. leaking of my Facebook Goodbye post”Submitted NCSC, GCHQ, UK Gov't expunge advice to “use Apple encryption” as a story · 376 points
HN discussionAlec Muffet, who helped Twitter on this, replied to your question on his blog: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor? [0] [0] https://alecmuffett.com/article/16007
Comment linking /article/16007
on “Twitter's new Tor onion service”Submitted Ross Anderson has died as a story · 312 points
HN discussionOne of the devs working on this already answered - https://alecmuffett.com/article/16007
Comment linking /article/16007
on “Twitter's new Tor onion service”Submitted Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor? as a story · 250 points
HN discussion> Not encrypted, hashed. I'm sure you know this, but to provide some context for others - this is one of the few spots where ambiguity between [password] encryption and hashing may have played a role. OP stated they used crack(1) shortly before L0pth was founded. That puts the timeline somewhere between 1989 and 1992. Although salted MD5 passwords had already become a known thing by then, there would have been legac…
Comment linking /alecm/software/crack/
on “L0phtcrack 7 will be released as open source”Submitted My interview with Steven Levy re. leaking of my Facebook Goodbye post as a story · 228 points
HN discussionA comment by an ex-facebooker with a few suggested workarounds for this sort of block: "... the the situation presents an educational opportunity to explore simple means to bypass to such mechanisms; ... reverse search terms, add extra search terms, mis-spell names so that the system “helpfully” fixes your typo for you after the block would have been applied in the pipeline." https://alecmuffett.com/article/15333
Comment linking /article/15333
on “Facebook is blocking searches for “Kyle Rittenhouse””Submitted Abuse prevention is tradecraft as a story · 126 points
HN discussionThey stress tested a compute farm for by brute forcing onion addresses. About 10 per week per CPU started with facebook. corewwwi was their favorite.[1] Onion addresses are longer now. [1] https://alecmuffett.com/article/15996
Comment linking /article/15996
on “Zooko's Triangle”Submitted Muffett versus MI5 as a story · 18 points
HN discussionRelated: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/11/2/eu-digital-identity-fr... https://alecmuffett.com/article/108139 (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109581 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109731 respectively, but we merged the comments hither)
Comment linking /article/108139
on “Last Chance to Fix eIDAS (Mozilla)”Submitted How End-to-End Encryption Is Not Preventing Policing, Arrest, or Conviction as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThe whitepapers: Messaging: https://engineering.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Messen... Labyrinth E2EE storage: https://engineering.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/TheLab... --- Comments by: Jon Millican https://twitter.com/JonMillican/status/1732582565884702982 Matt Green https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/17325670516070893... Alec Muffet https://alecmuffett.com/article/108588
Comment linking /article/108588
on “Building end-to-end security for Messenger – Engineering at Meta”Submitted MatrixDotOrg calling for security to be weakened so more people will adopt them as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted UK House of Lords amendment seeks client-side scanning to stop "viewing of CSAM" as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Draft CA AI Law Forces Provenance Tagging, Breaks Signal Messenger as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted North Korean phone has both censorship and accountability in the user interface as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Experts criticise EU for certificate proposal that enables spying on HTTPS as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to frame your post criticising Elon Musk for adding Encryption to TwitterDMs as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Leaving Facebook Engineering in 2016 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted EU's new Decryption Platform to tackle the challenge of encrypted material as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Compulsory spyware app to be installed on every Indian citizen's new phone as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The solution to Online Safety Act is *not* to call on platforms to "ban the UK" as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted EU: To protect Ukraine we must prevent their ability to have secure comms as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
