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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Metformin shown to prevent long Covid
A 14-day course of metformin, a common drug used to manage type 2 diabetes, prevents long COVID, according to a new study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases .
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New York State Senate passes prohibitions on non-competes
Monumental changes to New York law on non-compete agreements appear imminent. On June 7, 2023, the New York State Senate approved two bills concerning non-compete agreements. The first, Bill No. S3100A, proposes a ban on all non-compete agreements, while the second, Bill No. S6748, proposes a limited ban of certain…
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What Reddit Got Wrong
After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren’t there for the services, they’re there for the community. Building barriers to access...
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For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades
Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
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Logistics challenges of saving Air India’s diverted 777 in Russia
An Air India flight from New Delhi to San Francisco diverted to Russia after experiencing problems with one of its engines.
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It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)
Drugs cause addiction*. It is a rhetoric deeply ingrained into the American psyche based on a series of rat experimentations that placed one rat alone in a cage with two water bottles--one containing cocaine or heroin, the other just water. The rat chose the cocaine- or heroin-laced water every time until it died. The…
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The AI Hype Wall of Shame
Menu Home Editorial Collective Events Blog The AI Hype Report Design Justice AI Design Justice Labs The AI Hype Report Welcome to the AI HypeContinue reading
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Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat
The U.S. Patent Office has proposed new rules about who can challenge wrongly granted patents. If the rules become official, they will offer new protections to patent trolls. Challenging patents will become far more onerous, and impossible for some. The new rules could stop organizations like EFF,...
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Over 70% of US household Covid spread started with a child
A study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open suggests that 70.4% of nearly 850,000 US household COVID-19 transmissions originated with a child.
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WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
Imagine your performance at work was assessed directly from the amount of e-mails sent, the amount of time consumed editing a document, or the time spent in meetings or even moving your mouse. This may sound ludicrous but your boss might be doing exactly that.
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The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
Misguided modeling created a "physician surplus" narrative, the harmful consequences of which we are still dealing with today.
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Federal judge: Border searches of cell phones require a warrant
With United States v. Smith (S.D.N.Y. May 11, 2023), a district court judge in New York made history by being the first court to rule that a warrant is required for a cell phone search at the border, “absent exigent circumstances” (although other district courts have wanted to do so).EFF is...
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Statement on AI Risk
A statement jointly signed by a historic coalition of experts: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
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Rheinmetall pilot project for curb stone chargers for EVs
Rheinmetall launches first pilot project for innovative curb stone chargers with the City of Cologne and TankE
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Let us serve you, but don't bring us down
What just happened on archive.org today, as best we know: Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon's AWS services. (Even by web standards,10’s of thousands of requests per second is a lot.) This activity brought archive.org down for all…
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Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations
This memo contains the thoughts and recountings of events that transpired during and after the release of information about the NSA by Edward Snowden. There are four perspectives: that of someone who was involved with sifting through the information to responsibly inform the public, a security area director of the…
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58% of US adults have heard of ChatGPT; 14% have tried it
Just 14% of all U.S. adults say they have used ChatGPT for entertainment, to learn something new, or for their work.
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PyPI Was Subpoenaed
The PSF received three subpoenas from the US Department of Justice for PyPI user data in March and April of 2023.
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SFPD obtained live access to business camera network in anticipation of protest
New documents EFF received through public records requests have revealed that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) received live access to the hundreds of surveillance cameras that comprise the Union Square Business Improvement District’s (USBID) camera network in anticipation of potential...
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SCOTUS declines to hear challenge to warrantless pole camera surveillance
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to hear Moore v. United States, leaving in place a patchwork of lower court decisions on an...
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€1.2B GDPR fine for Meta
Facebook must stop further transfers of European personal data to the United States, given that Facebook is subject to US surveillance laws (like FISA 702 and EO 12.333).
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With new trade deal, Big Tech wants to be above the law
Here’s how Big Tech is trying to give itself immunity from government oversight through the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.
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The Alan Turing Institute has failed to develop modern AI in the UK
The UK’s flagship institute for artificial intelligence, the Alan Turing Institute, has been at best irrelevant to the development of modern AI in the UK.
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European standards bodies are inaccessible to Open Source projects
Europe’s standards bodies have no functional relationships with Open Source charities and do not consult them.