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Be Kind
Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 580 posts.
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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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The Town That Creep Built
architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures
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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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I would have hired Doug, but...
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…
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Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide
In this post, I’m going to talk about suicide, and why I’m still on this planet. These are stories I’ve kept secret from my family, girlfriends, and closest friends for years. Recently, however, I had an experience that shook me—woke me up—and I decided that it was time to share it all. So, despite the shame I […]
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“Information asymmetry” cuts both ways
– A Soviet-era political joke according to Wikipedia , though I've only seen it in an English text describing the C++ object model
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“Flower of Battle,” a combat manual created in the first decade of the 1400s
Fior di Battaglia = Flower of Battle = Flos Duellatorum , a combat manual created in the first decade of 15th cent. "Like people today,...
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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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Quadratic Voting (2014)
Glen Weyl has uploaded a new version of his paper, Quadratic Voting (written with Steven Lalley), to SSRN, which now includes the completed proofs. Quadratic voting is the most important idea for l…
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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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Outschooling in the Bay Area
Homeschooling is interesting because, if some new approach is going to disrupt the current education system and change it radically for the better, it seems likely it would come from outside the...
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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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There are now at least eight Chromium-based Android default browsers
Google Chrome is not the default browser on Android 4.3+. There are now at least eight Chromium-based Android default browsers, and they are all subtly, though not wildly, different.
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Removing EU roaming charges is a big deal (2014)
The European commission came to similar conclusions as those below - and limited the effects of its end-of-roaming-initiative to disallow a real competition between carriers from different European countries. Unfortunately, we will still suffer from limited competitions and widely varying offerings within the single…
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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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