Top all-time · #25688
Ghowen
Personal blog · ghowen.mesecurityhardwarewriting
Ghowen is a personal blog at ghowen.me about security, hardware and writing. Since 2015, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 3 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Personal site of Gareth Owen, a University of Portsmouth academic. HN readers cite it for his Tor traffic statistics talk and his analysis of the FBI's Tor-site malware, which he linked to the NSA tool EgotisticalGiraffe.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Art, stories, and the space between.
What Hacker News says?
The statistic comes from a talk at this year's 31C3 In Germany and was delivered by a professor from the University of Portsmouth -- Dr. Gareth Owen. His personal site: https://ghowen.me/other.html And a direct link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZdeRmlj8Gw I'd imagine he'll publish a full write-up soon but the talk was only a few weeks ago so il not surprised it's not out yet.
Comment linking /other.html
on “80 Percent of Tor Traffic Is Not Child Porn”I'm not sure this is relevant to computer science, but as a mechanical engineer, I've used differential equations and topology quite a bit in my coding. Topology has its important role in CAD and CAE softwares (particularly when dealing with manifold/non manifold objects) where it's important to understand the relation that various geometric entites have with one another (whether you're coding a tool or using one).…
Comment linking /build-your-own-quadcopter-autopilot/
on “What every computer science major should know (2011)”This is reminiscent of the 2013 takedown of Freedom Hosting.[0,1] Exploiting a JavaScript vulnerability in Firefox, compromised sites dropped a Windows executable (“Magneto”) which phoned home (bypassing Tor) with the user's MAC address and hostname. Gareth Owen identified it as EgotisticalGiraffe,[1] which is an NSA tool.[2] [0] http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/fbi-tor-exploit/ [1] https://ghowen.me/fbi-tor-ma…
Comment linking /fbi-tor-malware-analysis/
on “Feds bust through huge Tor-hidden child porn site using questionable malware”