8.21.26 | Aaron Swartz prosecution, AliExpress WebAudio fingerprinting, HTML capabilities

Hacker News Highlights · Aug 21, 2026 · 14m

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on Aug 21, 2026.

Feel free to leave feedback on Github: https://github.com/denolfe/hacker-news-highlights

(00:00) - Intro

(00:18) - Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

(01:41) - AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint

(02:51) - HTML Can Do That

(04:09) - I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

(05:43) - Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload

(07:27) - The August 17 outage

(08:47) - CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s…