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How to Ship a Beluga Whale via UPS
As a UPS cargo load master, Bland Matthews has been tasked with shipping everything from Terracotta Army soldiers to beluga whales.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Update on Digital Rights Management and Firefox
A year ago, we announced the start of efforts to implement support for a component in Firefox that would allow content wrapped in Digital Rights Management
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UN Experts Say TPP and Fast Track Threaten Human Rights
Prominent experts at the United Nations have now indicated that secretive trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) undermine human rights around the world, both because of the secretive, corporate-dominated process, and due to the substantive content of the provisions that arise...
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EFF Asks Patent Office to Focus on Protecting Public from Bad Patents
This week, together with Public Knowledge and Engine, EFF submitted written comments to the Patent Office regarding its Patent Quality Initiative. We urge the Patent Office to ensure that this program actually reduces the number of invalid patents being issued. Its quality efforts should serve the...
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Django Community Survey
Posted by Tim Graham on May 7, 2015
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Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
It all started with a simple Twitter query from a Baltimore man: “Anyone know who has been flying the light plane in circles above the city for the last few nights?” This was several days after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, and the subsequent riots and protests. Pete Cimbolic, an aviation buff and…
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Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”
In my view, what's most outmoded within science, most badly in need of retirement, is the way we structure and organize scientific knowledge itself. Academic literature, even as it moves online, is a relic of the era of typesetting, modeled on static, irrevocable, toothpaste-out-of-the-tube publication. Just as the…
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The Problem with Mobile Phones
Mobile phones have become ubiquitous and basic communications tools—now used not only for phone calls, but also for accessing the Internet, sending text messages, and documenting the world. Unfortunately, mobile phones were not designed for privacy and security. Not only do they do a poor job of protecting your…
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The New USA Freedom Act: A Step in the Right Direction, but More Must Be Done
A bipartisan group of congressional leaders has reintroduced the USA Freedom Act. The bill is an attempt to rein in the intelligence community's "Collect It All" strategy, and passing USA Freedom is a first, small step in the right direction. However, it has serious faults that should be addressed...
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Aaron’s Law Reintroduced: Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Didn’t Fix Itself
Aaron’s law, the proposed law named in honor of Internet hero Aaron Swartz was reintroduced last week by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Senator Wyden (D-Ore.), with new co-sponsor Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). This bill is the same as the one introduced in 2013 and we call upon Congress to move it...
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Surveillance forces journalists to think and act like spies
Once upon a time, a journalist never gave up a confidential source. When someone comes forward, anonymously, to inform the public, it's better to risk time incarcerated than give them up. This ethical responsibility was also a practical and professional necessity. If you promise anonymity, you're obliged to deliver…
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Congress: Stop Trying to Limit EFF’s Ability to Challenge Patents
EFF recently won our challenge to invalidate claims of the “podcasting patent” using a procedure at the Patent Office called inter partes review. This procedure allowed us to challenge a patent that was being used to demand licenses from individual podcasters, even though EFF itself had never been...
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EFF to Congress: Stop the Cybersurveillance Bills
EFF joined over 50 privacy and civil society organizations that sent two letters to Congress demanding it vote against the Senate Intelligence Committee's cybersecurity "information sharing" bill, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA, S. 754) and the House Intelligence Committee’...
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Internet Archive: What’s new with v2
As many of you have already seen, we are working on the next generation of the archive.org web site, which we call Version 2.0 (v2). It's in beta right now, so go check it out! We get a lot of feedback from the people who have elected to try out v2, and we read ALL of
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Is This Justice? Charging an Eighth Grader with a Felony for “Hacking”
A 14-year-old eighth grader in Florida, Domanik Green, has been charged with a felony for “hacking” his teacher’s computer. The “hacking” in this instance was using a widely known password to change the desktop background of his teacher’s computer with an image of two men kissing. The outrage of...
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Norway to switch off FM in 2017
The Ministry of Culture has announced a national FM-switch off, to complete the transition to digital radio. Norway is making...
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United Airlines Stops Researcher Who Tweeted about Airplane Network Security
Our client, Chris Roberts, a founder of the security intelligence firm One World Labs, found himself detained by the FBI earlier this week after tweeting about airplane network security during a United Airlines flight. When Roberts landed in Syracuse, he was questioned by the FBI, which ultimately...
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Remembering the Case that Established Code as Speech
One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce. We represented Daniel J. Bernstein, a...
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Police Must Respect the Right of Citizens to Record Them
“I’m asking all the citizens of North Charleston to continue taping.” That is what Councilwoman Dorothy Williams said in response to the shooting death of Walter Scott. She and others recognize that the story would have been very different without the video showing that a white police officer shot...
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Average Household Electricity Consumption - 2026
We used data from EIA to get up-to-date average household electricity consumption. We compiled statistics to compare to other countries.
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Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions
A new study by Cornell psychologists suggests that science and engineering faculty preferred women two-to-one over identically qualified male candidates for assistant professor positions.
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A New Era at the Tor Project
Andrew Lewman, our current Executive Director, is leaving The Tor Project to take a position at...
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Why the sun is a poor dumping ground for nuclear waste (2010)
A physicist explains why the sun is a poor dumping ground for nuclear waste.
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Why we will not be registering easydns.sucks
Similar to how it's getting harder these days to differentiate actual news from The Onion satires, reality takes on a somewhat surreal timbre when it starts to imitate your April Fool's gags from yesteryear… In 2011 we joked "easyDNS To Launch .SUX TLD", in which we posited a thinly veiled…