Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,108 posts.
The DMCA was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1998. It has a weird history. Its inception came from Bruce Lehmann, Microsoft's chief copyright enforcer, whom Clinton tapped to serve as his Copyright Czar. This was back in the "Information Superhighway" days, when Al Gore was holding hearings on the demilitarization…
In 2012, I signed the Cost of Knowledge pledge, and stopped reviewing for, and publishing in, all Elsevier journals. In the four years since, I’ve adhered closely to this policy; with a coupl…
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are man-made hazardous chemicals that are spread globally in the atmosphere and as a result they can be found in the rainwater and snow in even the most remote locations on Earth. During the last 20 years, guideline values for PFAS in drinking water, surface waters and soils…
what does MrBeast mean?
Philip Greenspun wrote a post on his Harvard blog about MIT grads over 50 having a hard time finding work. In his post he cites a piece I wrote about how I would have hired Doug Engelbart, when I was running my first startup in the 80s. His piece is getting a lot of traffic. That's good. I'm glad people are thinking…
Freedom of the Press Foundation2020503 points493 commentscited by 3Society, Policy & Culture details
New report, "U.S. Press Freedom in Crisis: Journalists Under Arrest in 2020," details how more than 117 journalists were arrested across the country in 2020.
Gary K Wolf is the author of a fantastic 1981 novel called Who Censored Roger Rabbit? which Disney licensed and turned into an equally fantastic 1988 live action/animated hybrid movie called Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But despite the commercial and critical acclaim of the movie, Disney hasn't made any feature-length…
Yesterday (Feb 5 2014) On February 4th, NBC News ran a story claiming that if you bring your mobile phone or laptop to the Sochi Olympics...
Propaganda is most impactful when people don't think it's propaganda, and most decisive when it's censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived.
Why is it that when a place is [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale], it so often gets coded as being “gentrified” or “upscale”?
Get ready for the CCPA compliance scams from Princeton.
‘RECOVER!’ came the shout from the back seat of my Tornado GR4 combat jet but it wasn’t necessary - I had already started…
DURHAM, N.C. -- In 1923, lead was first added to gasoline to help keep car engines healthy. However, automotive health came at the great expense of our own well-being.
I originally wrote this for my friends and family in 2015, to explain why the latest Facebook privacy policy is really harmful. It’s since been read b
On goal drift and lower reliability. Or, why can't LLMs play Conway's Game Of Life?
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce that a copyright lawsuit threatening an important database of time zone information has been dismissed. The astrology software company that filed the lawsuit, Astrolabe, has also apologized and agreed to a 'covenant not...
On the trend of consumer software designed around developer convenience instead of user needs, from forced accounts to telemetry to privilege creep.
The online advertising industry is behind comprehensive illegal collection and indiscriminate use of personal data, research from the Norwegian Consumer Council shows.
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
Outpourings of grief and calls for change continue to flood the Internet after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, only 26 years old. Aaron was one of our community's best and brightest, and he acheived great things in his short life. He was a coder, a political activist, an entrepreneur, a contributor to...
