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True Surprise
How many true surprises are there in life? This was the question I asked Mrs. Bastard when she was pregnant with our first child and wanted ...
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 742 posts.
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DHS Asserting Unconstitutional Authority to Search Travelers’ Phones and Laptops
BOSTON — The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU today asked a federal court to rule without trial that the Department of Homeland Security violates the First and Fourth Amendments by searching travelers’ smartphones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry without a...
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We can break up Big Tech
By Elizabeth Warren
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How I Almost Destroyed a £50M War Plane and the Normalisation of Deviance (2016)
‘RECOVER!’ came the shout from the back seat of my Tornado GR4 combat jet but it wasn’t necessary - I had already started…
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Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server
Let’s lead with the punchline: the question of what comes after IRC, for Mozilla, is now on my desk.
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The Mueller Report, Searchable and Accessible on the Archive
Last week, the American public finally got its hands on the Mueller report–more than 400 pages, much of the text redacted, detailing the special counsel’s much anticipated findings. Within minutes of that release, many copies of that file were uploaded to the Internet Archive. On Amazon, other outfits were charging…
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Congress and the Public
Do you approve or disapprove of the way [ROTATED -- The Republicans in Congress. The Democrats in Congress.] are handling their job? Do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job?
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Meditations on Moloch (2014)
I. Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch:What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and u…
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How healthy is the internet?
With over two decades of global impact, Mozilla Foundation continues to lead the movement for a better technology future—powered by people, open by design, and fueled by imagination.
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Massachusetts Court Blocks Warrantless Access to Real-Time Location Data
There's heartening news for our location privacy out of Massachusetts this week. The Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest court, ruled that police access to real-time cell phone location data—whether it comes from a phone company or from technology like a cell site simulator—intrudes on a...
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Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea
Patients having some sort of “control” over their own medical data is a perennial favourite blockchain pitch. We may have found the source.
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Notes on AI Bias
Machine learning is the new centre of tech, and like all big new things there are issues. ‘AI bias’ is much-discussed right now: machine learning finds patterns but sometimes it finds the wrong one, and it can be hard to tell.
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Reasons not to reveal your DNA
With over two decades of global impact, Mozilla Foundation continues to lead the movement for a better technology future—powered by people, open by design, and fueled by imagination.
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The global population pyramid
Global demographic transition signals a shift from young, growing populations to older, stable ones, reshaping societies and economies.
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Is everything an MLM
Last week, I linked to a NYT article about the spread of CorePower Yoga: how its business model is contingent upon enrolling thousands in expensive “teacher training” courses, even though there’s already a surfeit of teachers out there.
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A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report PDF
What can we learn about the Mueller Report from the PDF file released by the Department of Justice (DoJ) on April 18, 2019?
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The Mueller Report Can’t Be Copyrighted, Is Flagged by Copyright Bots Anyway
Did you know that anything created by federal government employees, under American law, can’t be copyrighted? They go right into the public domain. That means it’s impossible for there to be any copyright infringement on, say, a report by the Special Counsel on the investigation into the President...
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India will soon overtake China to become the most populous country in the world
Explore data from the United Nations World Population Prospects.
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People Lose Their Employer-Sponsored Insurance Constantly
If you like your employer plan, you don't get to keep it.
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Lessons from the Long Depression
"war, after all, is a highly effective (though destructive) demand stimulus." Sinking new warships, new warplanes, new tanks in the ocean without ever having used them would still be a great demand stimulus. So why not sink the money in infrastructure etc. ?
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Work harder or the communists will win
It’s desperate times for those still clinging to their workaholic, exploitive ways. From Japan to China to even the US, there’s a growing understanding that working 70-80-90 or 130 hours per week i…
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