Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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The Memes of Information Security
There are memes common to whole Stack Exchange. But after spending some time in The DMZ it becomes evident that Information Security has it's own memes (e.g. rory).
I therefore propose that this ...
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You're making a difference!
Occasionally, we receive some e-mails that really make us proud of doing the job we do here, thanking us for the knowledge this site, along with a few others on the network, has made available. These ...
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Please do not dump Wikipedia into tag wikis
Please do not populate tag wikis by copying text from Wikipedia.
Reviewers, please reject tag wiki suggestions that are copied from Wikipedia or other sources, or more generally that suggest content ...
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"Is (x) Secure" Question Anti-Pattern
A common problem that I see with questions is that they ask something like "Is (x) secure", which to me is an unanswerable question, the same way as asking "is the city north", it has no meaning in an ...
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Should we allow malware authors to weigh in on questions?
The title is perhaps more inflammatory than the reality, but I can alter it later.
Concerning this answer: https://security.stackexchange.com/a/120775/6253 to the question "What should you do if you ...
schroederMod
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A Security Stack Exchange CTF team
Updates:
Added first challenge to prepare
We have a CTFTime team, secse. Please join this.
We communicate over Slack. To get an invitation to the group you can contact Benoit Esnard, HamZa, Xavier59,...
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Request for comment: Stack Overflow is hiring a Director of Information Security
This is a bit unorthodox, but also extra meta: we (Stack Overflow, the folks behind this here site), are looking to hire our first Director of Information Security and I'd appreciate any feedback you ...
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Can people please be a little less zealous with close votes?
This question currently has 3 flags against it for "primarily opinion based". If you read it, and its edit history, at no point was it opinion based. It is quite clearly asking whether VSTs could ...
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Too aggressive with "off-topic" comments?
The question: Authenticating a user via SMS elicited a very interesting comment from the OP after a very new user (<20 days) suggested the question was off-topic.
I don't mean to kick a hornet's ...
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Congratulations to our third 100k member of Sec.SE (first human member...)
Congratulations to Steffen Ullrich who has just passed 100k! Like the Great and Little Bears before him, this is no small feat!
With over 2000 answers, one with 431 upvotes, and four with over 100 ...
Rory AlsopMod
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Is Security.SE only for professionals?
I recently asked a question that made it to "Hot Network Questions" and picked up a huge number of views, upvotes and favorites in a very short time.
The moderators put it "On Hold", because the ...
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Clarify our stance on black hat questions
In the site FAQ, it is written:
Black Hat vs White Hat - This site is not intended to be a resource for Black Hats, or malicious hackers. While we understand discussion of exploits may require ...
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Zalgo text invades Security.SE
Zalgo text (http://textozor.com/zalgo-text/) takes advantage UTF8 and rendering. Some, like the user profile below are relatively benign. Some, not so much. The user below is brand new to Security.SE.
...
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I hereby declare the 22nd of September each year to be Bear Day!
Thomas Pornin, one of the most distinguished members of our community has reached 100k rep, a terrific milestone!
A complete list of his contributions to the site is probably way too long to fit into ...
user10211
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2015 Community Moderator Election Results
Information Security's third moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderator is:
He'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank him for ...
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Are the wrong questions and answers getting too many upvotes?
On the Tour page for Security.SE it states:
Information Security Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Information security professionals.
However, when I see questions like this Does ...
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IT Security Stack Exchange Top User Swag
As a thank you for being awesome, if you have at least 1,000 reputation and are on page 1 or page 2 of …
https://security.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&filter=all
… we'll ...
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Praise the day! Our ursine overlord has brought more glory than ever!
Thomas Pornin, our ursine overlord has reached the milestone of 200,000 reputation on Sec.SE!
Before we delve into the bear's amazing here are some facts about his account(s):
The bears are the only ...
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Design for IT Security
I'm Jin, and I'll be working on the designs for the Stack Exchange sites as they graduate from the beta phase. Each site will have its own unique theme that will reflect its topic. However, all sites ...
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Why doesn't security.stackexchange.com use HTTPS?
When trying to access https://security.stackexchange.com I get redirected to regular HTTP.
In case I'd be using a public wifi someone could simply hijack my session and post whatever they want or ...
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Why is "citizenfour" a tag?
I understand that people might reference the movie in a question. But shouldn't the tags for that question be related to the security technology/technique they're asking about, and not which movie it ...
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Why do people post questions on here they can easily google an answer for?
I'm honestly being serious. It's just not on this forum either. Why do people put in the time and effort to post a question they can simply google the answer for? Posting their question on a forum ...
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Congratulations to Schroeder for hitting 100k
Congratulations to @Schroeder for hitting 100k! Our 5th 100k-er
He not only manages to be the most active moderator on Sec.SE, but also has answered over 1500 questions
Well done!
Rory AlsopMod
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Can we all stop posting duplicate questions about the Heartbleed bug?
I have noticed 9/10 posts appear to be about the heartbleed vulnerability, and most of them seem to be duplicate questions. Please, search for existing answers to your question before you ask it, ...
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School Exercise and Answer that only give Clues
So, today someone asked a school question
AES-ECB chosen plaintext attack with long secret
Usually, I don't answer those but I decided to help the OP by giving some clues about how to solve the ...
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How to handle "Sensationalist" questions and answers?
When I saw the question How does Windows 10 allow Microsoft to spy on you? with 10'000 views, and an answer that seems to be not accepted for it's accuracy or facts, I wondered if there's precedent on ...
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Do we want hats?
In 2011, the Gaming Stack Exchange hosted an event called Hat Dash, where users earned "hats" for their gravatars by completing certain tasks (analogous to badges):
Certain actions would trigger the ...
Rory AlsopMod
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Plagiarism on SE
I've often seen suspicious answers on SE. They're too detailed, well formatted. I put some of the body text of the answer in Google and I quickly spot the original source.
E.g., I flagged this one ...
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Code review / Deobfuscation: Why is it considered off-topic here?
I viewed the help center multiple times and, unless I'm missing something, I didn't see anything related to code-review being off-topic, so all this time, I assumed it was allowed here.
Let's take ...
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Difference between security stackexchange and cryptography stackexchange?
What is the difference between this stackexchange website and https://crypto.stackexchange.com/ ?
Are there some rules or guidelines to what to post here and not there, and vice versa?
To me, ...
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We still don't have a 404 image
Back when we were discussing site design, @Jin came up with this design question and we do have some answers which could be relevant to our 404 page.
I think we need to get something defined, as ours ...
Rory AlsopMod
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Do we only rely on community member's memories to identify duplicates?
I have a habit of reviewing the latest posts at least once a day. Sometimes I realize that I have seen a particular question before and am able to mark it as a duplicate. Sometimes I check the SE if ...
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Let's not go to Stack Overflow; 'tis NOT a silly place
TL;DR How can we stop people from suggesting that bad questions be re-asked on Stack Overflow?
Every so often, a new user asks a question that is more programming-related than security related. Then ...
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A design update is coming!
You may have noticed some updates to the design lately, they are part of a SE network-wide update to a new base css framework.
The updates allow us to:
Have sharper / more beautiful design on retina ...
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Official Security Stack Exchange Anniversary Competition
As Security Stack Exchange has just passed its 1st anniversary of graduation, we are going to follow in the tradition of other sites and run a competition.
With prizes! Cool ones!
Obviously in order ...
Rory AlsopMod
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Blog - actions required
As discussed previously on this post and this one, the current SE hosted blog service on WordPress is going away - with an ideal timeline of 1 Jan 2017.
It shouldn't be immensely complex, but there ...
Rory AlsopMod
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Is it acceptable to ask a question and give an answer strictly for peer review?
I want to ask a question where I believe I know the answer but am not 100% confident in my own answer, so would it be good practice to ask it, answer myself and see what others have to say about it ...
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Downvoting anything that looks like "how do I write malware"
I recently posted a question about methods for preventing alterations to a file or program. A short while after posting, it occurred to me that malware often tries to do that. Sure enough, when I came ...
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Google CTF 2017, 17 June 2017 at 00:00 UTC, lasts 48 hours
Let's participate in Google CTF 2017.
The CTF will begin on 17 June 2017 00:00:01 UTC and ends on 18 June 2017 23:59:59 UTC.
As usual, we will play as team sec.se, but unlike previous CTFs, because ...
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Are we a free malware analysis service?
Every so often we get questions about someone having found malware and wanting to know what it does. Essentially they are asking us to analyze the malware and tell them what it is. The latest one is ...
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Does it make a sense to add own answer over an already accepted answer?
Suppose a question was asked 4 months ago and the OP was satisfied by a given available answer: Is there any benefit to add y own answer to the OP's question 4 months later?
user45139
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Is security.stackexchange vulnerable to session hijacking?
I'm logged in to security.stackexchange and I'm not using https to browse the site.
Does this mean that the site is vulnerable to session hijacking? I assume that it's not, but I don't get how ...
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Requests for Question of The Week blog posts
Since starting the Security Stack Exchange Blog on 15 July 2011 we have some excellent blog posts, and a large number of these are from our Question of the Week posts. Going forwards, it is probably ...
Rory AlsopMod
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Ads for this site on Stack Overflow show questions with bad grammar
I was browsing Stack Overflow when I saw the following ad for Information Security on the right side of my window:
As you can see, this question title has bad grammar. It should read "Does one need ...
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What is the appropriate way to handle posts requiring very minor edits?
Occasionally, I come across questions or answers with grammatical errors that have a major impact on the meaning of a sentence, but take less than 6 characters to fix. This question for example ...
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The great 2015 tag cleaning [closed]
With every passing year and our growing popularity, we see lot of new questions. This is a good thing :)
Due to the nature of question tagging, we are generating lots of new tags every week. It's not ...
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Sunshine CTF 2016 - 12 March 2016 at 16 pm UTC, lasts 28,5 hours
Let's participate at Sunshine CTF 2016.
The CTF will begin on 12 March 2016 16:00 UTC and ends on 13 March 2016 20:30 UTC.
As usual, we will play as team sec.se. The team communicates through the ...
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Should a question be marked as duplicate, even if the new one is better?
The question "Why can I log in to my Facebook account with a misspelled email/password?" was asked yesterday, and a very well-written answer gathered nearly 200 upvotes in about a day (I assume the ...
user163495
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Spam, spam, [spammer] and [spam]
We currently have two tags for spam:
spam, 316 questions
spammer, 17 question
While I understand the difference between the person who sends the spam and the spam itself, that is not a meaningful ...
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Breaking a specific system and How to demonstrate an understanding of concepts involved
I recently noticed that a lot of questions asking for how can I exploit this specific code or filter get closed (but a lot of them also do not get closed) or marked as duplicates of the general topic ...
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