Cryptanalys.is – Hacker News for crypto, security, and privacy

https://cryptanalys.is

by markmassie • 12 years ago

33 39 12 years ago

cryptanalys.is

_xhok• 12 years ago

I have to ask: is it just me, or are those upvotes on the frontpage faked?

presty• 12 years ago

most probably

he should've faked/imported some comments too, if he wanted to seem more legit

GigabyteCoin18• 12 years ago

That's not easy! But you're right, it probably needs to be done.

leobelle• 12 years ago

My thoughts. lobste.rs is the only really remotely viable alternative to HN and it doesn't have near that many upvotes for items on the front page, but it has some discussion.

_b8r0• 12 years ago

There's articles with 40+ votes and no comments. That doesn't seem quite right to me.

GigabyteCoin18• 12 years ago

I just lowered the random karma value for new auto-submitted stories.

The majority of the website is currently populated by me, the site's creator, but that will stop once it gains a large enough userbase to sustain regular submission rate.

Thank you for taking a look! (I created cryptanalys.is)

KMag2• 12 years ago

They don't even seem to have been seeded with faked values, but rather pinned to fake values. I upvoted one article and downvoted another, and several minutes later the scores remain unchanged.

I can see the upside to manually tweaking the votes until you get critical mass, but pinning the votes to faked values makes the transition more difficult than just seeding with fake values and letting the community adjust from there.

GigabyteCoin18• 12 years ago

The reason your upvote remained unchanged is that anybody with 10 karma points or less bears no weight on the voting algorithms.

I'm experimenting with having higher karma-valued posters have more weight when it comes to voting.

Was that you who registered as KMag? You now have 100 karma and your votes will be counted from now on.

GigabyteCoin18• 12 years ago

Creator here. The upvotes on the frontpage are indeed faked. It's quite obvious I'm sure to the HN crowd.

Please accept my apologies. I posted the site originally with just a few articles and nobody even gave it a single upvote on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7339368

I assumed it was due to the fact that "nobody wants to start a conversation with themselves" so I tried to make the site look a bit more used.

throwwit• 12 years ago

"Warning! Cryptanalys.is will not work with javascript disabled!" A crypto site with mandatory javascript... seems legit

GigabyteCoin18• 12 years ago

The site relies quite heavily on javascript. Sorry about that.

All of the voting and commenting is handled with Ajax, and all of the comment sorting is done by javascript to lessen the load on my tiny servers.

shomyo• 12 years ago

Passwords can only consist of the following characters: a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and !@#$%^&()-_. Please choose another.

Sure.

Epic: http://i.imgur.com/zT30wY1.png

No thank you.

GigabyteCoin18• 12 years ago

There really isn't a reason for the limit on the password characters. I suppose I can lift that restriction now.

I don't get what you mean by "Epic:" and the link to the karma-collection script.

If you care to explain what you don't like about the website I will try my best to improve the experience.

The site just launched a few days ago and I need feedback from early-eyes like yours to help shape the user experience.

I appreciate your taking a look at the website.

KMag2• 12 years ago

Restrictions on input characters are often as strong indication that a cryptographic key derivation function (or even just a salted cryptographic hash function) isn't being used to store the passwords.

See http://plaintextoffenders.com

lisper2• 12 years ago

Wow, lisper, is that really you?

Yeah, it was really me. But I don't have a bitcointalk.org account. There is more to crypto, security and privacy than bitcoin.

GigabyteCoin18• 12 years ago

The site was originally conceived as a HN version of /r/Bitcoin so that's the reason for the bitcointalk.org karma collection.

If I get more complaints about it I will surely remove it. the site just went live a few days ago and I thought it was a good idea when creating it. So that's why it's there.

lisper2• 12 years ago

My expectations were set by the HN headline: "Hacker News for crypto, security, and privacy." But I see now you didn't submit the item. You might want to consider putting a banner on the site: "Hacker News for Bitcoin". That would make transferring accounts from bitcointalk seem more reasonable.

p4bl04• 12 years ago

Seeing the link title I thought "nice, an HN like with focus on my domain and less bitcoins related crap". Wow, I couldn't be more wrong. "crypto, security and privacy" should not mean "bitcoin, bitcoin, and vaguely web security stuffs, and bitcoins". That plus the obviously fake upvotes… I won't even try to register, too bad.

kybernetikos• 12 years ago

"bitcoin, bitcoin, and vaguely web security stuffs, and bitcoins".

Sounds a lot like hackernews on the bad days.

nomailing• 12 years ago

what's your problem with bitcoin? maybe you just have to accept that a lot of the HN and crypto audience is interested in bitcoin.

drdaeman• 12 years ago

Articles like "Bitcoin's Satoshi Nakamoto Is Reportedly Worth Over $400 Million" or "Insuring the Bitcoin loss with another digital currency" have no relation to crypto (especially, cryptanalysis), security or privacy.

kjs3• 12 years ago

Bitcoin isn't really the point. If they put up a site claiming to be about "crypto, security and privacy", but 80% of the posts they attract (or post themselves because they don't have critical mass) are on a single topic, then either it's really not about "crypto, security and privacy", or they're doing a really bad job building out the site. It's not like there isn't a whirlwind of activity in cryptography outside of hashes, nor a lack of security incidents to discuss.

And requiring JS? On a security site? Fail.

p4bl04• 12 years ago

what's your problem with bitcoin?

It doesn't interest me. For various reasons which mainly includes political ones.

maybe you just have to accept that a lot of the HN and crypto audience is interested in bitcoin.

I entirely accept that (however I'd remove "and crypto" from your sentence to make it closer to the truth). I'm not complaining that people on HN post a lot of Bitcoin related content. It's a community website, not my own. If Bitcoin interest people in the community then it should be there. There is too much Bitcoin for my taste, but I just don't click on it and look for the other stuff that actually are of interest to me. And there are still a lot of interesting discussions on HN that are not about Bitcoin.

simmons• 12 years ago

At the risk of engaging in self-promotion, I've been toying with a blog for discussing crypto/privacy topics [1], because I do think there's an unfilled need for such. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are within the scope as cryptographic technologies, but my idea is to keep it focused on the technical issues. There's not much content now, just news links to articles I've found interesting.

[1] https://cipherpal.com/

p4bl04• 12 years ago

I'll check it out. Thanks :).

GigabyteCoin18• 12 years ago

You're more than welcome to post any cipherpal.com articles to cryptanalys.is!

I will add cipherpal.com to my list of sites I scour daily trying to populate cryptanalys.is with fresh content.

GigabyteCoin18• 12 years ago

Creator, here! I agree, it's a little Bitcoin heavy at the moment... but you have to admit the cryptography sphere has been dominated by the recent Satoshi Nakamoto debacle, and it was only launched a few days ago.

My apologies for pre-populating the site with some articles and upvotes. I read that's how reddit got started so I figured I would give it a try.

I first submit Cryptanalys.is to HN a few days ago with just 8 posts from myself and no extra upvotes, and it didn't get a single pageview: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7339368

So yes most of the stories and karma values on there are not submit by real people... yet. Here's to hoping.

If you have any ideas on sources for better/more-interesting information I would love to hear them.

I appreciate your taking a look at the website.

p4bl04• 12 years ago

On thing is true: the site only begins and users can make it whatever they want. However, since you start by giving more karma to people in the Bitcoin community, you already drive the website to focus heavily on Bitcoin (also, look at the "library" page https://cryptanalys.is/library.php it is only Bitcoin related). Which is entirely okay! There are many people interested by that (and if it could relieve HN from the contant Bitcoin noise that would be awesome). You even say so in your FAQ: "Fellow Redditors and HNers may think of us as the cryptocurrency subreddit of Hacker News". That is a valid choice, and I think you should present your site like this rather than "Hacker News for crypto, security, and privacy".

you have to admit the cryptography sphere has been dominated by the recent Satoshi Nakamoto debacle

No, I don't agree. I'm doing a PhD in the field of crypto, follow multiple mailing lists related to my field, watch for the new papers arriving on the IACR ePrint [1], follow many blogs and subreddits… and I can assure you the real crypto sphere don't give a damn about "the recent Satoshi Nakamoto debacle". Bitcoin enthusiasts do, however.

[1] http://eprint.iacr.org/ (btw, this is a very good source of security related original content).

PS: in your "what is this" at the top of the page you are not consistent with "r/subreddit" and "/r/subreddit" (leading '/'), you should fix that.

krapp2• 12 years ago

It's ok.

I don't see the point of forcing js on a site like this, though, and it's bound to turn a lot of crypto people away.

Also, where is the source code? I looked for a link to it but couldn't find it. You can't expect to run a site for security/crypto people without code they can at least pretend to audit.

GigabyteCoin18• 12 years ago

I am the creator here. Thank you for taking a look!

You raise a good point, as others in this thread have. Forced-javascript + security just don't jive. I should have known that. But one aspect of the site's small server-footprint make the javascript somewhat necessary. For commenting and voting at least...

I plan on making a text only version of the homepage, and linking to that at the bottom footer as I do the rss feed: https://cryptanalys.is/rss.php (which is currently not visible due to an encoding error apparently!)

Maybe a "retro" version of the homepage would be to your liking? Like this: http://retro.hackaday.com/

The source code is not public, yet. I don't see what good it would do to publish the source of a website from a security perspective, though. It's not like you can take the digest of a webpage and prove that it's coming from the source code on github.

krapp2• 12 years ago

I understand using js to push some of the rendering time off on the user but surely you could mitigate some of the overhead with caching headers. I mean, the pages themselves are not that big...

As far as the source code goes, true enough (that seems to be a fundamental problem with applying open source ethics to the web) but as long as you're trying to attract security-minded individuals, maybe let them make pull requests and improve the security of the site?

Still though, it looks nice and I do like the collapsing threads.

GigabyteCoin18• 12 years ago

Well! So the second I go to sleep the other night, markmassie re-posts my baby to HN and it actually gets some traction. Just my luck :P

I have worked on Cryptanalys.is for about 2 months part time. It's a complete re-write of the HN platform in PHP and Javascript. I posted this the other day and was all ready for HN stardom only to receive exactly 0 votes and ~45 visitors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7339368

Needless to say, after seeing the "popsicle stick bomb" upvoted to the top of HN literally the next day I was quite disappointed. So, thanks for finally checking it out everyone!

The site just went live a few days ago so yes there will be some problems. But if you'll post your qualms below I am all ears to try and fix them!

Cryptanalys.is – Hacker News for crypto, security, and privacy

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