Good, the ad was really disturbing. An ad is just an ad and not the biggest deal in the scheme of things but that was really unpleasant to watch. For me, it was the visual of needless destruction and waste as much as the meta-message.
> Can someone give some notes about the security of NaCl Secretbox using Poly1305 as authenticator and XSalsa20 for encryption?
(Speaking as an unqualified outsider) Both Poly1305 and Salsa20 are creations of Daniel Bernstein / djb, who seems about as highly respected as you can be in the crypto community. And NaCl, the library they use that implements them (also by djb), is often highly recommended as a 'good' crypto library to use.
That said, it does go against the usual advice not to trust code from people who make their own encryption rather than using existing standards, but maybe this is the exception?
There was an article recently with some good commentary about how uneasy some people feel with how much of modern crypto being used in production is coming from relatively few people, including djb, but I can't seem to find it now...
Careful now :) It's not like there's anything stopping HN attracting a wider audience anyway; there's no restriction on who can register. Anyone can come and join in, which (in my opinion) is as it should be.