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The rise of user-hostile software
On the trend of consumer software designed around developer convenience instead of user needs, from forced accounts to telemetry to privilege creep.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
5102
My dead dad’s journal
For some reason, when my brother told me our dad was dead, I immediately went and listened to my voicemails. He left me silly voicemails often and I wanted to hear his voice.
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Is Hacker News a good predictor of future tech trends?
I set out to investigate whether Hacker News is a useful barometer for up-and-coming technologies that will hit the mainstream within the next few years.
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Bahraini Government Hacks Activists with NSO Group Zero-Click iPhone Exploits
We identified nine Bahraini activists whose iPhones were successfully hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware between June 2020 and February 2021. The hacked activists included three members of Waad (a secular Bahraini political society), three members of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, two exiled Bahraini…
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Fighting Like Taliban
Over the last month or so we have seen several reports out of Afghanistan registering the shock of the Americans, the Afghani government, and even the Taliban itself with the speed at which the Tal…
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Platforms want to be utilities, self-govern like empires
Whether it’s “bringing the world closer together” (Facebook), “organizing the world’s information” (Google), to be a market “where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Amazon) or “to make personal computing accessible to each and every individual” (Apple), the founding missions of…
5107
Bigger vehicles are directly resulting in more deaths of people walking
Smart growth is an approach to community design that connects housing, transportation, and land use to create healthy, prosperous, and resilient neighborhoods.
5108
Machine learning’s crumbling foundations
Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that's unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that's insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.
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Noted study in psychology fails to replicate, crumbles with evidence of fraud
About 80 people pointed me to this post by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson about a 2012 article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Apparently some of the data in that paper were faked; see for example here:
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EFF Joins Global Coalition Asking Apple CEO Tim Cook to Stop Phone-Scanning
EFF has joined the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and more than 90 other organizations to send a letter urging Apple CEO Tim Cook to stop the company’s plans to weaken privacy and security on Apple’s iPhones and other products. Have you signed the petition?
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Free Software, not as in ‘free speech’, nor as in ‘free beer’
Ahmad Haghighi’s personal page.
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Ashley's Apple Story
Ashley's Apple Saga
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What is ‘elite overproduction’?
Elite overproduction … describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite-members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.
5117
The Tail End (2015)
No matter what your age, you may, without realizing it, be enjoying the very last chapter of the relationships that matter most to you. Make it count.
5118
Google introducing tool for under-18s to remove images of them from search
Today we’re announcing a variety of new policies and updates to help keep kids and teens safe as they spend more time online.
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Facebook’s Widely Viewed Content Report is strange
According to new data, the most popular post on Facebook is a business that sells golfing dates with former Green Bay Packers players. What?!
5120
Apple’s device surveillance plan is a threat to user privacy – and press freedom
The backlash from privacy and human rights advocates to Apple's new plan this month for scanning photos on user devices to detect known child sexual abuse images has been loud and nearly unanimous. The tech raises press freedom problems, too.
5121
As cities grow in size, the poor 'get nothing at all': study
On average, people in larger cities are better off economically. But a new study published in the Royal Society Interface builds on previous research that says, that’s not necessarily true for the individual city-dweller. It turns out, bigger cities also produce more income inequality.
5122
Global deforestation peaked in the 1980s
There was a marked acceleration in deforestation in the 20th century. But, global deforestation peaked in the 1980s. Since then, it has slowed.
5123
Mastodon now a non-profit organisation
In June, I was able to officially register Mastodon gGmbH after nearly 8 months of legal work (“gGmbH” means “non-profit limited liability company”). A non-profit limited liability company in Germany is structered and operates similarly to a for-profit limited liability company with a few key differences. The founding…
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Computer simulation helps test land management techniques to help bumblebees
The many threats facing bumblebees can be tested using a “virtual safe space” created by scientists at the University of Exeter.
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Historian suspended by Facebook after sharing document by Goebbels
To: Oversight Board Good day, My name is Igor Petrov, I am an independent historian. The list of my publications, including those for Cambridge University Press, is available at https://independent.academia.edu/IgorPetrov40 On August 6, 2021, whilst conducting archival research and working with…
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The Queen's Duck
Brian Wigginton
5127
Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
In the middle of a conflict, good analysis is hard to come by. Because adversaries do not telegraph their plans to one another, plans depend greatly on the fact patterns surrounding their execution…
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Where does the plastic in oceans come from?
Which countries and rivers emit the most plastic to the ocean? What does this mean for solutions to tackle plastic pollution?
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