Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,107 posts.
Today, Google's services experienced a limited outage for about 27 minutes over some portions of the Internet. The reason this happened dives into the deep, dark corners of networking.
A s*** font that f***ing censors swearing automatically
53MB of source code leaked from a government endpoint. 269 verification checks. biometric face databases. SAR filings to FinCEN. and the same company that verifies your ChatGPT account.
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.
Dear mastodon.technology community,
I worked for Google for about three and a half years as a video producer. I was fired because I raised alarm about a doomsday cult that…
Ring isn't just a product that allows users to surveil their neighbors. The company also uses it to surveil its customers.An investigation by EFF of the Ring doorbell app for Android found it to be packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers’ personally identifiable...
One man's struggle with his mortality.
“If a $1000 PhD side project could kill millions of people, we must end viral [gain-of-function research], or it may end us.”
There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it,…
A 28-year-old Kansas man was shot and killed by police officers on the evening of Dec. 28 after someone fraudulently reported a hostage situation ongoing at his home. The false report was the latest in a dangerous hoax known as “ swatting ,” wherein the perpetrator falsely reports a dangerous situation at an address…
Atlassian unites every team with Jira, Confluence, Loom, and Rovo AI agents; one connected platform for planning, tracking, and delivering work.
Most people have an extremely incorrect perception about waste disposal and recycling. Here’s the reality.
Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
Should AI systems treat different demographic groups unequally?
CORRECTION: This post previously identified the sender of the 550 falsely identified URLs as Europol's EU Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU). The sender was in fact, the French national Internet Referral Unit, using Europol's application, which sends the email from an @europol.europa.eu address. The EU IRU has informed…
A guest post by Lars Doucet
From media reports and individual findings that various people have presented to us, it seems that the new social media platform owned by the former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, so-called Truth Social, is using Mastodon’s source code with various visual adjustments. The platform has not formally…
Across the U.S., home prices have outpaced income. Our data reveals how the American dream of homeownership is becoming a nightmare.
I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute…
A huge fuckup, with perhaps not-so-huge policy stakes
Why did mental health fall off a cliff at the same time and in the same way in the USA, The UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand? Part 1 of 3.
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
Written by an actual teen
