3931
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
3932
Paul Kalanithi, writer and neurosurgeon, dies at 37
Paul Kalanithi wrote essays for The New York Times and Stanford Medicine reflecting on being a physician and a patient, the human experience of facing death, and the joy he found despite terminal illness.
3933
Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation is filing suit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) of the United States. The lawsuit challenges the NSA’s mass surveillanc…
3934
We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
The public sector is often seen as sclerotic and conservative in contrast with a dynamic and innovative private sector. This assumption lies at the basis of much of the outsourcing of public services to the private sector. In this interview and her new book, Mariana Mazzucato argues against this assessment and in…
3935
The time has come to stand up for the GPL
The Software Freedom Conservancy provides a non-profit home and services to Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.
3936
Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
KAHNEMAN: Could you elaborate on these possibilities? I mean, what's the distinction between predicting and setting up a range of possibilities?
3937
VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation
Software Freedom Conservancy announces today Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. This is the regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig and Conservancy's ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly with the terms of the GNU General Public…
3938
3939
EFF to UN: You Need a Privacy Watchdog
EFF joined more than sixty civil liberties organizations and public interest groups from across the world yesterday in calling upon the world's governments to support the creation of a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy. The special rapporteurs are independent experts...
3940
3941
Congress Is Poised to Introduce a Bill to Fast Track TPP So It's Time to Act Now
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks are stalling while the White House assures its trading partners that this secret trade agreement won't be amended when it comes back to Congress for ratification after the President signs the deal. That's why the Executive is scrambling to get its allies in...
3942
Dear FCC: Thanks for Listening to Team Internet
Today the FCC voted three to two to reclassify broadband Internet access as a common carrier service under Title II of the Communications Act, and forbear from the parts of the Act that aren’t necessary for net neutrality rules. This reclassification gives the FCC the authority to enact (and...
3943
White House Doesn't Want You to Know the TPP's Effects on U.S. Copyright Laws
As the White House doubles down on its attempt to pass legislation to fast track secret trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, their oft-repeated refrain about these deals' digital copyright enforcement provisions is that these policies would not alter U.S. law. In a...
3944
EFF Outlines Plan to Fix the Broken Patent System
San Francisco - The U.S. patent system is in crisis, but there are clear steps Congress and the White House can take to mitigate the impact of vague patents, patent trolls, and a weak legal process to protect competition and creativity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explains in a new...
3945
“Citizenfour” Awarded Oscar for Best Documentary in 2014
CITIZENFOUR, Laura Poitras' riveting documentary about Edward Snowden's efforts to shed light on gross surveillance abuses by the United States government and its partners, just won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Tonight's Oscar win recognizes not only the incredible...
3946
Go to Prison for File Sharing? That's What Hollywood Wants in the TPP Deal
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States' excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will...
3947
EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection
San Francisco - People have a Fourth Amendment right to privacy when it comes to their genetic material, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues in an amicus brief filed this week with the Supreme Court of the United States. EFF is asking the Supreme Court to hear arguments in Raynor v....
3948
3949
3950
Our brief in support of Twitter's First Amendment suit against the US government
Yesterday, NYU Technology Law & Policy Clinic filed a legal brief on behalf of Freedom of the Press Foundation in Twitter's important lawsuit against the government for violating their First Amendment rights.Buoyed by the Snowden disclosures that began eighteen months ago, tech companies like Twitter have been…
3951
An Open Letter to Tim Cook Regarding the App Store 70/30 Revenue Split
The official blog of the AnyList team.
3952
More than 39M Americans Only Have Access to One Wired Broadband Provider
Since 2010 the US government has spent $3.3B on broadband infrastructure yet 39 Million Americans only have access to 1 wired broadband provider. See the worst states and learn more about your state.
3953
A Few Global Cultural Treasures We Will Lose for 20 Years Under the TPP
What do Japan's Blue Sky Library, Malaysia's answer to John Wayne, and the first recorded composer from New Zealand, all have in common? They could all disappear from their countries' public domain for the next 20 years, if the current agreement on copyright term extension in the Trans-Pacific...
3954
EFF Files FOIA Suit Over U.S. Marshals’ Cell-Tracking Spy Planes
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to shine light on the U.S. Marshals Service's (USMS) use of small aircraft mounted with controversial cell-phone tracking systems. The Wall Street Journal revealed last year that the...
3955
EFF Files Brief in Case to Hold IBM Responsible for Facilitating Apartheid
EFF defends rights in the digital world. But what about when the digital world enables violations of human rights? We think that’s important, too. That’s why we filed an amicus brief in In Re: South African Apartheid, a case that seeks to hold IBM's headquarters in New York responsible for...
3956
An Exemption to the DMCA Would Let Game Fans Keep Abandoned Games Running
When you buy a video game, you expect to be able to play it for as long as you want. You expect be able to play it with your kids many years from now if you want (well, maybe not Grand Theft Auto). And you would hope that museums and media historians could preserve the games that were so important...
3957
Things to Love About Reddit’s First Transparency Report
Here’s something that merits a lot of reddit gold. On Thursday, reddit published its first-ever transparency report covering all of 2014. It’s a summary of all the legal requests to take down content from the site as well as all government attempts to access reddit’s user data. Lots of companies...
3958
YouTube Ditches Flash, and It Hardly Matters
Last week, Google announced that its Youtube service would default to using HTML5 video instead of Flash. Once upon a time, this would have been cause for celebration: after all, Flash is a proprietary technology owned by one company, a frequent source of critical vulnerabilities that expose...
3959
3960
Negotiators Lose Last Chance to Salvage the TPP by Caving on Copyright Extension
New reports indicate that Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators have agreed to language that would bind its 12 signatory nations to extend copyright terms to match the United States' already excessive length of copyright. This provision expands the reach of the controversial US Sonny Bono...