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Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 153 posts.
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Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Here are some theories about why
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China's New Cybersecurity Program: No Place to Hide
Chinese distributors can help foreign companies reach customers without setting up a business in China. The wrong agreement can leave a supplier locked into years of poor sales, trademark disputes, or regulatory problems. Here are ten issues we address before a client signs.
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The China Cultural Clash
The NBA controversy in China highlights a culture clash that both tech companies and the U.S. government need to take to heart. Plus, why Tiktok being Chinese is increasingly a problem.
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Winning the Blackbird Battle
We’re happy to report that on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion affirming a lower court decision dismissing the case brought by Blackbird Tech. This is the last step in the process, we’ve won.
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How I Almost Destroyed a £50M War Plane and the Normalisation of Deviance (2016)
‘RECOVER!’ came the shout from the back seat of my Tornado GR4 combat jet but it wasn’t necessary - I had already started…
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When it comes to privacy, default settings matter
What if I told you that on nearly every single website you visit, data about you was transmitted to dozens or even hundreds of companies, all so that the w
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No one should have to travel in fear
I’ve worked for Silicon Valley companies for more than a decade and international travel is a necessary part of my job. I’ve had my fair…
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Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior from China
We removed seven Pages, three Groups and five Facebook accounts as part of a small network that originated in China and focused on Hong Kong.
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An update on Sunday’s service disruption
Yesterday, a disruption in Google’s network in parts of the United States caused slow performance and elevated error rates on several Google services, including Google Cloud Platform, YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive and others. Because the disruption reduced regional network capacity, the worldwide user impact varied…
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Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
David analyzes the root causes of the Boeing 737 Max crash. Read here.
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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
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Update on free software and telemetry
Telemetry services and GitLab. (GitLab CE will continue to be free software)
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The Slow Death of Hollywood
(Big issue 7-9-2019)
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Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
Don’t decry congestion pricing as inequitable until after you fix, or at least acknowledge, these ten other things that are even more inequitable about the way we pay for transportation.
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The principle of charity: Criticize the best interpretation of an argument
The principle of charity is a philosophical principle that denotes that, when interpreting someone’s statement, you should assume that the best possible interpretation of that statement is the one that the speaker meant to convey. Accordingly, to implement the principle of charity, you should not attribute falsehoods…
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The AI Threat to Open Societies
Good evening and thank you all for coming. I want to use my time tonight to warn the world about an unprecedented danger that’s threatening the very survival of open societies. Last year when I stood before you I spent most of my time analyzing the nefarious role of the IT monopolies. This is what […]
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Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
Today, at the Microsoft Build developer conference, CEO Satya Nadella announced ElectionGuard, a free open-source software development kit (SDK) from our Defending Democracy Program. ElectionGuard will make voting secure, more accessible, and more efficient anywhere it’s used in the United States or in democratic…
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Let's discuss the source for the GPLed parts of Tesla cars
It has been many years since we started working with Tesla to help them resolve their ongoing GPL violations. However, Tesla has still not provided the necessary source code for their cars (a benefit of ownership enshrined in the GPL, which Tesla chooses to use) and the incomplete versions of source they have released…
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Two More Cases of Third-Party Facebook App Data Exposure
Third-party Facebook apps gather Facebook data about the people who use them. While Facebook struggles to contain these exposures, insecure third-party data practices & misconfigured cloud systems continue to leak Facebook data to the internet. See how UpGuard discovered and secured two such cases.
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The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most Nations
A groundbreaking study from Just Facts has found that the poorest 20% of Americas consume more goods and services than the averages for most of the world�s richest nations.
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Mental Mountains
I. Kaj Sotala has an outstanding review of Unlocking The Emotional Brain; I read the book, and Kaj’s review is better. He begins: UtEB’s premise is that much if not most of our behavior is dr…
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Stuxnet was embarrassing, not amazing (2011)
As the New York Times posts yet another breathless story about Stuxnet, I’m surprised that no one has pointed out its obvious deficiencies. Everyone seems to be hyperventilating about its pur…