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Zach Aysan
Personal blog · zachaysan.com/writing · on HN as 3pt14159securityphilosophy
Zach Aysan's personal blog at zachaysan.com covers security and philosophy. Since 2017, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “Self-Crashing Cars”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Most-linked posts?
- Self-Crashing Cars4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-01-17
- Zero-Width Characters: Invisibly fingerprinting text2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-12-31
What Hacker News says?
In my article that Tom[0] links to I mentioned a number or methods, but you may be interested in a followup piece I wrote as well: https://www.zachaysan.com/writing/2018-01-01-fingerprinting-... Essentially the best method against these fingerprinting techniques isn't technical—it's just not re-sharing the contents in the first place. Sorry, small differences are just too easy to embed and there are so many bits to…
Comment linking /writing/2018-01-01-fingerprinting-update
on “Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text”Submitted Zero-Width Characters: Invisibly fingerprinting text as a story · 572 points
HN discussionBecause there was this period of time where the prevailing wisdom was "be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you emit" to enable computer systems to handle a wider array of cases. Some people still adhere to it. I don't. If I want to extend a system that's currently in English to also accept Arabic or Farsi / Persian, you better believe I'm sanitizing that input carefully. Otherwise I'm opening up…
Comment linking /zero
on “Null”Submitted Self-Crashing Cars as a story · 248 points
HN discussionYou might be interested in reading my update: https://www.zachaysan.com/writing/2018-01-01-fingerprinting-... Humans make fixes that are hard to codify in programming. I know it isn't perfect, but with my audience in mind (journalists) I thought it was probably safer than something automatic.
Comment linking /writing/2018-01-01-fingerprinting-update
on “Zero-Width Characters: Invisibly fingerprinting text”Submitted Self-Crashing Cars as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHi everyone, thanks for the feedback! I'm not sure if this deserves its own submission or not, but I have a short update to this post available here: https://www.zachaysan.com/writing/2018-01-01-fingerprinting-... One very interesting comment from an editor of The Weekly Standard.
Comment linking /writing/2018-01-01-fingerprinting-update
on “Zero-Width Characters: Invisibly fingerprinting text”Submitted The World of Bits as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's not public yet. Sorry. If you subscribe to my RSS feed you'll be sure to hear about it when I start talking about it. https://www.zachaysan.com/writing/feed.xml
Comment linking /writing/feed.xml
on “Don’t Let Facebook, or Any Tracker, Follow You on the Web”Submitted Zero-width characters and other text fingerprinting methods as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is cool in a sort of "stick it to the man" kinda way, but simple sites don't need to be weird. My whole site is just HTML and CSS. It renders normally on every platform. I host everything myself (purchased fonts, images, etc). I don't have to copy and paste HTML each time, because I wrote a static site compiler from scratch in Ruby. I don't even use any gems, it's that easy. For an example article, check out: h…
Comment linking /zero
on “How the Blog Broke the Web”Submitted The Conservative Election as a story · 1 points
HN discussionPeople misunderstand the dangers of AI. The danger isn't (or isn't yet anyway) that AI is going to develop will and agency and oppose us. The danger is that AI is a force multiplier in whatever you do because it allows the intelligent to automate formerly rote tasks. For example, take self-driving cars. Formerly all you could do if you had a remote execution exploit was smash running cars into ditches or oncoming tr…
Comment linking /cars
on “AI is going to supercharge surveillance”Submitted Self-Crashing Cars as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI worry less about software / hardware crashes leading to death and more about cyberattack. I've written about it before[0]: We need regulations before a mass breach of autonomous systems happens. Not after. This whole bullshit where corporations claim all sorts of things about their security then get owned trivially has happened for every OS and device out there. The supposedly secure QNX was installed into countle…
Comment linking /cars
on “Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars”Submitted Self-Crashing Cars: A cyber-security expert on regulating autonomous devices as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou may want to read this admittedly long take on it: https://www.zachaysan.com/cars
Comment linking /cars
on “Cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off an autonomous car”Location: Toronto, Canada Remote: Willing to do remote, yes. Willing to relocate: Willing to relocate, but nothing colder than Toronto. Technologies: Python (Django), Ruby (Rails), advanced SQL, MS Excel including Solver. Résumé/CV: On request. Email: zachaysan@gmail.com Blog: https://www.zachaysan.com/writing GitHub: https://github.com/zachaysan I'm open to backend roles, including roles I've done before but haven'…
Comment linking /writing
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)”