Hacker News: viralpoetry

The Google Pixel 3 Is a Good Phone. But Maybe Phones Have Gone Too Far. (2018)

viralpoetry — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 10:51:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mathonan/google-pixel-3-review-android

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677472

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by viralpoetry in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

viralpoetry — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:58:01 +0000

My personal blog posts a few times a year, with a focus on security

https://www.malgregator.com/

New comment by viralpoetry in "If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?"

viralpoetry — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 14:14:43 +0000

"The gains in technics are never registered automatically in society: they require equally adroid inventions and adaptations in politics; and the careless habit of attributiong to mechanical improvements a direct role as instruments of culture and civilization puts a demand upon the machine to which it cannot respond."

- Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

New comment by viralpoetry in "A Technical Look at BitMessage: Learning From a Dead Project"

viralpoetry — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 18:22:39 +0000

This was actually solved by another address protocol version. I believe v3 solved this by using pubkey instead of hash. Similar to late btc addresses

Making identical U2F hardware security keys

viralpoetry — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 18:58:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.malgregator.com/post/u2f/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41259253

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by viralpoetry in "Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album"

viralpoetry — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 19:43:56 +0000

I have tried to build one out of the PocketBook Basic Touch e-reader last October. It has way less functionality tought...

https://www.malgregator.com/post/pocketframe/

https://hackaday.com/2023/11/13/obsolete-e-reader-gets-new-l...

New comment by viralpoetry in "Compromised Microsoft key: More impactful than we thought"

viralpoetry — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 07:32:48 +0000

> copying keys between HSMs inherently exposes the master keys anyway

that's not true, even with their BYOK you export the key from one HSM under a shared key and then import it to another device

New comment by viralpoetry in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

viralpoetry — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 07:20:52 +0000

https://www.malgregator.com/

I write mostly about the security and things I work on, to keep memories somewhere.

One of my posts about the google bug bounty for the Waze navigation bug went viral and was shared by Schneier, Threat Post and others https://www.malgregator.com/post/waze-how-i-tracked-your-mot...

New comment by viralpoetry in "Why have a blog? (2020)"

viralpoetry — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 11:42:28 +0000

The simplest I saw, install Standard Notes (https://standardnotes.com/ - open source, free) encrypted notes app, write something, then publish it via the interface. It will create you a blog on their https://listed.to/ webpage

New comment by viralpoetry in "Encrypted CRDTs for building privacy focused collaborative software"

viralpoetry — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 05:40:47 +0000

Thanks for an interesting article and nice simple webpage

New comment by viralpoetry in "BitTorrent v2"

viralpoetry — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 07:04:04 +0000

Fearing return to drachma, some Greeks use bitcoin to dodge capital controls https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-eurozone-greece-bitcoin/f...

WikiLeaks may have amassed more than $46 million in Bitcoin based on the number of coins held by its known wallet address. https://bitcoinist.com/wikileaks-has-received-more-than-46-m...

New comment by viralpoetry in "Celebrate Woz's 70th"

viralpoetry — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 11:03:08 +0000

When I was university student (~ 2012), Woz was traveling Europe visiting Macdonald's (:D) in lots of countries including Slovakia. Shared it on the internet, probably Twitter.

One of my classmates tracked him and successfully asked for a photo with him. nice guy

New comment by viralpoetry in "Using the NFC Chip of the Passport to Do Proof-of-Work"

viralpoetry — Mon, 04 May 2020 20:10:27 +0000

A Hammer in Search of a Nail

Proof of Work require no secret information as an input and have to be easy to verify. But most importantly, why would anyone do this?

Passport issuer can act like certification authority, this is not a trustless system where PoW can be used for something. Public key infrastructure is a solved thing with it's own problems, but verification is not one of them if authority is working as it should.

EDIT: Let's not even mention that smartcards have effective lifetime and efficiency.

New comment by viralpoetry in "What Happened to Lee"

viralpoetry — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 15:12:03 +0000

What an ignorant I was. March last year (2019), I wrote an email to Lee Holloway asking him how he could bootstrap such a great company. Now I know why I haven’t received the answer.

EDIT: I found an email:

Dear Lee Holloway,

Excuse my curiosity, as an Engineer I am not writing this kind of emails a lot, but I have read the blog series by John Graham-Cumming about the company, and it would really help me if you can answer my question about the constant flow of engineering innovations from your company.

I am a security engineer from Europe and would like to know how is it possible, that security team will start producing such a stream of innovative things like Keyless SSL, CFSSL, SIDH implementation, Red October key management server and many more your company already published?

When the "lift and shift" from the open source or vendor stops and internal building start to happen within an organization? Is it a cultural thing where only a small startup can succeed and scale later? Is it about the budget or is it a cultural shift that is non forcible upon them? Is a prerequisite to the innovation, that almost everything is developed in house? That came to me as a contra productive strategy. I have read Skunk Works and other books, but I am still impressed how that happens regarding to the modern leading IT/infra companies.

Thank you for your time,

...

New comment by viralpoetry in "Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?"

viralpoetry — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 09:46:39 +0000

I occasionally write about security, mostly about applied cryptography from non-math perspective.

If you are interested on day to day work in financial cryptography and hardware encryption modules, check:

https://www.malgregator.com/post/key-management/

Some predictions on future malware development (some of them confirmed by now):

https://www.malgregator.com/post/the-future-of-malware/the-f...

Or using modern smartcards like Yubikey with DevOps tools (Vault) by leveraging ancient technologies like pkcs11:

https://www.malgregator.com/post/vault-authentication-with-y...

New comment by viralpoetry in "ACM Prize in Computing Awarded to AlphaGo Developer"

viralpoetry — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 13:20:55 +0000

How you ended up implement it in the code? Is it just a heuristic implemented as a series of if/else/case statements? Minimax? Thank you

EDIT: sorry, I found out that source code is available, I will try to find it

EDIT2: Looks like it's up for sale, not open

New comment by viralpoetry in "Orca: 2D esoteric programming language where every alphabet is an operator"

viralpoetry — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 14:54:22 +0000

I just want to say that ORCA author, Devine Lu Linvega[1], is such a talented and creative person. He build complete ecosystem with it's own language, drag & drop theme support[2] and human readable DB format[3]. He and his girlfriend (cartoonist) Rekka Bell are sailing the ocean and working from their sailboat Pino[4].

[1] https://wiki.xxiivv.com/

[2] https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Themes

[3] https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/indental.html

[4] https://100r.co/site/about_us.html

New comment by viralpoetry in "Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?"

viralpoetry — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 12:05:14 +0000

Hi, thanks for sharing your website. You are doing interesting research.

Show HN: Acmedns Authenticator Plugin for Certbot

viralpoetry — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 08:01:04 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/pan-net-security/certbot-dns-acmedns

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22363826

Points: 36

# Comments: 2

New comment by viralpoetry in "Twitter locks WikiLeaks account days before Assange's extradition hearing"

viralpoetry — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 14:06:01 +0000

Worth to mention that Brazil charged Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald with cybercrime charges similar to Assange. The guy who first met Snowden in HK with Laura Poitras.

Even if it looks like they have "postponed" prosecution for now.

https://theintercept.com/2020/02/06/glenn-greenwald-intercep...