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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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Removing Bad Actors on Facebook
We removed 32 Pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior.
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Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress with Mugshots
Amazon’s face surveillance technology is the target of growing opposition nationwide, and today, there are 28 more causes for concern. In a test the ACLU recently conducted of the facial recognition tool, called “Rekognition,” the software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress, identifying them as other people…
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Around 90% of all river-borne plastic that ends up in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers
The world has become increasingly alarmed at the amount of plastic in its oceans. But where does all this plastic waste come from?
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Working Hours
How much time do people across the world spend working? How have working hours changed over time, and what do these changes matter for people’s lives? Explore data and research on working hours.
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The Absolute Denial of Shit
Today emoji are used by 92% of the world’s online population. The diminutive images have inspired a holiday and a $50 million animated movie. You can even make a living translating them. The Emojicon convention draws attendees from around the world. Topics of discussion at the 2018 gathering in Brooklyn include: “How…
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Illegal Production and Use of Banned CFC-11 in China's Foam Blowing Industry
We investigate and campaign against environmental crime and abuse
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South Korea has limited a working week to 52 hours, in order to stop overwork
The previous limit was almost 10 hours every single day, including weekends.
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Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People
In order to protect civil liberties without hampering innovation, lawmakers should require public input before surveillance tools are deployed and ensure that facial recognition databases are purged of data related to law-abiding people.
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How the Blog Broke the Web (2017)
I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flan
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“I-Cut-You-Choose” Cake-Cutting Protocol Inspires Solution to Gerrymandering
CMU researchers say getting political parties to equitably draw congressional district boundaries can be as easy as sharing cake.
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Police search homes of Zwiebelfreunde board members and OpenLab in Augsburg
On June 20th, board members of the „Zwiebelfreunde“ association in multiple German cities had their homes searched under the dubious pretence that they were „witnesses“ while their computers and...
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How Property Taxes Shape Our Cities
Taxation is a powerful planning tool, whether we want it to be or not.
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With EFF’s help, language teacher responds to threat over ‘invalid’ patent
Foreign languages have been taught, and studied, for thousands of years. People who teach languages are the last folks that should be dealing with patent threat letters—but incredibly, that’s exactly what has happened to Mihalis Eleftheriou. Hodder and Stoughton, a large British publisher, has sent...
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The Japanese Calendar’s Y2K Moment
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EFF Sues to Invalidate FOSTA, an Unconstitutional Internet Censorship Law
We are asking a court to declare the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (“FOSTA”) unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced. The law was written so poorly that it actually criminalizes a substantial amount of protected speech and, according to experts,...
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AntiPolygraph.org appears to have been “de-listed” from Google on key searches
Search DuckDuckGo for “polygraph” and you’ll find AntiPolygraph.org, which hosts more documentation on polygraphs than any other site on the Internet, in the top 10 results. The same is true for searches on “polygraph” with Microsoft’s Bing search engine (in the United States), with Russia’s Yandex search engine, and…
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Why ActivityPub is the future
We often tout things like “Mastodon is based on open web protocols” as one of its advantages. I want to elaborate why exactly that’s a good thing.
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Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)
Research based at Princeton University found that poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life.
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YouTube (Un)Blocks Blender Videos
The Free and Open Source 3D Creation Software — blender.org
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Zen Magnets: 6 Years of Battle End in Victory
“We will not settle for any sort of stop-sale of magnets that are perfectly safe when not misused… We vow to continue this [legal] battle until our very last drop of cash-flow blood”, promised in August 2014 , forecasting 95% chance of a glorious honorable death of insolvency on the legal battlefield.
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How much of the world’s land would we need in order to feed the global population with the average diet of a given country?
There are large differences in the land of different diets, mostly depending on how much meat people eat.