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The reason Facebook won’t ever change
Facebook’s (much deserved) media nightmare continued this week when it came under criticism for spamming members who signed up for two-factor authentication. This was followed by charges that its P…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 597 posts.
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Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
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Signal Foundation
Long before we knew that it would be called Signal, we knew what we wanted it to be. Instead of teaching the rest of the world cryptography, we wanted to see if we could develop cryptography that worked for the rest of the world. At the time, the industry consensus was largely that encryption and...
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Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
[I am not an economist or an expert on this topic. This is my attempt to figure out what economists and experts think so I can understand the issue, and I’m writing it down to speed your goin…
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Michael Lewis and the parable of the lucky man taking the extra cookie (2017)
In 2012, Michael Lewis gave a commencement speech at Princeton University, his alma mater. In the speech, Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The
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Just teach my kid the math
This is a new thing for me - I'm hosting a blog post by a colleague/friend - James Tanton. You can find James' original post here. One reason it's being re-hosted here is because Medium is apparently blocked in some countries: Egypt Malaysia ..... possibly others. It is astounding to me that mathematics - of all…
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The case for ending Amazon’s dominance
It should not be difficult to love Amazon. To consumers, it offers choice and convenience. Countless internet ventures have relied on its cheap, flexible cloud computing services to start and scale…
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Twitter Killing Its Mac App
Holy smokes: For the full Twitter experience on Mac, visit Twitter on web. ???? https://t.co/fuPJa3nVky — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 16, 2018 I’m glad Twitter got rid of all of the Nazis and Russian bots on their platform before this.
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OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
I was a contributor for OpenStreetMap for a long time, and I advocated for OpenStreetMap for a long time, but the project has stalled while the proprietary mapping world has continued to improve in data quality. For those of us who care about Free and Open data, this is a problem. In this article, I explore the…
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Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement
Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and...
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Disappointing Findings on Anti-Poverty Cash Transfers in the USA
Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are rapidly expanding as a poverty-reduction strategy around the world. Following the publication of positive findings…
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Utility poles
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services
Anonymity technologies are becoming a legal requirement for public agency and corporate anti-corruption compliance.
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Why the world needs OpenStreetMap (2014)
Every time I tell someone about OpenStreetMap, they inevitably ask "Why not use Google Maps?". From a practical standpoint, it's a reasonable question, but ultimately this is not just a matter of practicality, but of what kind of society we want to live in. I discussed this topic in a 2008 talk on OpenStreetMap I gave…
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The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)
BitTorrent used to dominate not just piracy, but the internet. Now, it’s barely noticed in traffic studies. What happened to the platform?
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8.3 Who Pays for Schools?: Where California's Public School Funds Come From
Where does the money for public schools in California come from? What is the role of property taxes in education? When did income taxes become the biggest source of school funding? Does the lottery provide a lot of money for schools?
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Let’s talk about usernames
A few weeks ago I released [django-registration](/projects/django-registration/) 2.4.1. The 2.4 series is the last in the django-registration 2.x line, and …
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Metacrap
Version 1.1, May 18 2001. Changed section orders for better organization. (Thanks, Raffi). Clarified "metrics" in 2.6 (Thanks, Andy).
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Startup Won't Give in to Motivational Health Messaging's $35k Patent Demand
Trying to succeed as a startup is hard enough. Getting a frivolous patent infringement demand letter in the mail can make it a whole lot harder. The experience of San Francisco-based Motiv is the latest example of how patent trolls impose painful costs on small startups and stifle innovation. Motiv...
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Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
Soros vs. Facebook One of the big headlines from last month’s World Economic Forum at Davos was a scathing speech delivered by George Soros. The ... Read more
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John Perry Barlow has died
With a broken heart I have to announce that EFF's founder, visionary, and our ongoing inspiration, John Perry Barlow, passed away quietly in his sleep this morning. We will miss Barlow and his wisdom for decades to come, and he will always be an integral part of EFF. It is no exaggeration to say...
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A Developer’s Guide to Responding to National Security Letters
When the FBI Shows Up at Your Office with an NSL When you receive thousands of requests from law enforcement each year, it’s actually not a surprise wh