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After millennia of expansion, the world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’
The world produces more food than ever, but the amount of land we use is now falling. This means we can feed more people while restoring wild habitat.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 894 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
782
A legislative path to an interoperable internet
It’s not enough to say that the Internet is built on interoperability. The Internet is interoperability. Billions of machines around the world use the same set of open protocols—like TCP/IP, HTTP, and TLS—to talk to one another. The first Internet-connected devices were only possible because phone...
783
Fact Check now available in Google Search and News
Now the Fact Check label in Google News is available everywhere, and has been expanded into Search globally in all languages.
784
iPhone 12 withdrawn from French market for non-compliance with EU regulation
As market surveillance authority for radio equipment and responsible for controlling public exposure to electromagnetic fields, the ANFR runs inspections on mobile phones placed on the French market. 141 mobile phones, including Apple’s iPhone 12, have recently been tested to check compliance with limit SAR values…
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The government uses targeted advertising to track your location
The online advertising industry has built a massive surveillance machine, and the government can co-opt it to spy on us.
789
Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
Diaspora, the “open Facebook alternative” (NYT story for background if you aren’t familiar), has raised Over $170,000 from over 4600 people in just a few weeks. All for an idea. That’s an impressive start if victory was measured in press coverage, cash, and cool. HereR…
790
Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
Explore the diversity of wildlife across the planet. What are species threatened with? What can we do to prevent biodiversity loss?
791
Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)
From Cloudflare’s headline-making takedown of the Daily Stormer last autumn to YouTube’s summer restrictions on LGBTQ content, there's been a surge in “voluntary” platform censorship. Companies—under pressure from lawmakers, shareholders, and the public alike—have ramped up restrictions on speech,...
792
YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music
YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music Posted by timothy on Sunday February 26, @04:43PM from the estate-of-john-cage-winces-with-envy dept. New submitter eeplox writes “I make natu…
793
Online Safety Act – shutdowns and site blocks
Report incorrectly blocked sites on UK ISP and mobile networks.
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Abstract software patents struck down by Supreme Court
In a long-awaited decision, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank today, striking down an abstract software patent. Essentially, the Court ruled that adding “on a computer” to an abstract idea does not make it patentable. Many thousands of software patents—particularly the...
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Why rails buckle in Britain
Why don’t rails get hot in Europe? The truth is they do.
798
230, or not 230? That is the EARN IT question
Over the past several weeks, Signal traffic has gone through the roof. New users are signing up at unprecedented rates, and we’ve expanded our server capacity faster than we ever anticipated. It means a lot to us that so many people are relying on Signal during this difficult time. When users che...
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The EU's Link Tax Will Kill Open Access and Creative Commons News
All this month, the European Union's "trilogue" is meeting behind closed doors to hammer out the final wording of the new Copyright Directive, a once-noncontroversial regulation that became a hotly contested matter when, at the last minute, a set of extremist copyright proposals were added and...
801
Unencrypted patient medical information is being broadcast across Vancouver
The Open Privacy Research Society is a non-profit Canadian group based in Vancouver, British Columbia. We believe that moral systems enable consent. Our society exists to invent, create, build, test, publish, deploy, promote, and to encourage the development of such systems
802
EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems
Update: Open source OSes might be saved from being covered depending on the interpretation of EU regulation 2019/1150 2.2.c.
803
I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients
ChatGPT recently passed the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, but using it for a real-world medical diagnosis would quickly turn deadly.
804
EFF Patent Project Gets Half-Million-Dollar Boost from Mark Cuban and 'Notch'
San Francisco - America's broken patent system needs major reform to protect innovators and the public. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is announcing a major new boost to its patent work: a half-million dollars in funding from entrepreneur Mark Cuban and game developer Markus "Notch...
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Discord fined €800k for failing to comply with several obligations of the GDPR
This page is no longer available. Order to comply or sanctions issued by the CNIL may be made public. In this case, a time limit shall be specified in the decision. Once this time period has expired, the organisations that have been given formal notice or sanctioned are no longer identified in the public decision. For…
806
Update on free software and telemetry
Telemetry services and GitLab. (GitLab CE will continue to be free software)
807
Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
Google search is in the news. Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google search is a monopoly and is behaving in a manner that suppresses search competition with their distribution agreements. The debate on this has started,...
808
Facebook's GDPR consent bypass reaches Austrian Supreme Court
Austrian Supreme Court may refer case to Court of Justice, questioning the basis of Facebook's business model in Europe.
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Mozilla Files Cross-Complaint Against Yahoo Holdings and Oath
Yahoo Holdings and Oath filed a complaint against Mozilla on December 1, 2017, claiming that we improperly terminated the agreement between Mozilla and Yah