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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Trolls Are Real
In most issues of EFFector, we give an overview of all the work we’re doing at EFF. Today, in light of recent developments at the U.S. Patent Office, we’re doing a deep dive into a single issue: recent changes to the patent system, and how it’s in danger of heading backwards.
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Overwatch Randomized Trial on Gender
A recurring discussion in Overwatch (as well as other online games) is whether or not women are treated differently from men. If you do a quick search, you can find hundreds of discussions about this, some of which have well over a thousand comments. These discussions tend to go the same way and involve the same…
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How Badly Is Google Books Search Broken, and Why?
I periodically write about Google Books here, so I thought I'd point out something that I've noticed recently that should be concerning to a...
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An Honest Living
What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition.
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Obesity and overweight
Obesity and overweight fact sheet from WHO providing key facts and information on causes, health consequences, double burden of disease, prevention, WHO response.
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Is it creepy when brands pester you on social media?
You're sat in a pub, chatting with your mates. You start to moan about how the cheap lager they serve gives you a headache. All of a sudden, a stranger runs up to you and says: "Oh no! Headaches? Have you tried the refreshing taste of Pepsi® Cola? It's the Flavour That Keeps Giving™!" I suspect you would complain to…
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Winning the Blackbird Battle
We’re happy to report that on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion affirming a lower court decision dismissing the case brought by Blackbird Tech. This is the last step in the process, we’ve won.
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A Love Letter to the People Who Build the Internet Archive
When you visit a public library, you get to meet the librarians and others who build and care for those collections. You know there are people who empty the garbage cans, who put back the borrowed books, who maintain the computers, and who determine what ends up on the shelf.
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Amazon in Its Prime: Doubles Profits, Pays $0 in Federal Income Taxes
Amazon, the ubiquitous purveyor of two-day delivery of just about everything, nearly doubled its profits to $11.2 billion in 2018 from $5.6 billion the previous year and, once again, didn’t pay a single cent of federal income taxes.
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Skype contact lists may have been exposed (2017)
UPDATE: February 14, 2019: Since writing this article in late 2017, Microsoft seems to have made a change that makes it a bit harder to reverse
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A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
*Note: the discussion of historical poverty trends here is updated and developed more fully in the recent article, “ Capitalism and extreme poverty ”, published in World Development . Dear Steven, I’m writing to respond to a letter you posted regarding claims I made in the Guardian about
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Public hacker test on Swiss Post’s e-voting system
Die Post unterstützt mit ihren Dienstleistungen den Alltag der Menschen in der Schweiz, in der physischen und in der virtuellen Welt. Beim E-Voting digitalisiert sie, was sie bereits am besten kann: den sicheren Transport vertraulicher Informationen.
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Kenya Government mandates DNA-linked national ID, without data protection law
Last month, the Kenya Parliament passed a seriously concerning amendment to the country’s national ID law, making Kenya home to the most privacy-invasive national ID system in the world. The ...
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Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters
On the rise of newsletter production, consumption, and monetization, and how email is one of the most powerful and resilient publishing platforms.
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How to fight the surveillance economy
Stop supporting data harvesting business models by picking alternative services and ad channels. Also, please don’t share this on Facebook.
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Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless
When an ISP decides to exempt certain applications or services from cutting into a user's data cap, that's zero rating. And the evidence is in that it conclusively makes broadband more expensive. A comprehensive multi-year study by the non-profit Epicenter.works, comparing the 30 member countries...
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Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in Income Taxes
The popular video streaming service Netflix posted its largest-ever U.S. profit in 2018—$845 million—on which it didn’t pay a dime in federal or state income taxes. In fact, the company reported a $22 million federal income tax rebate.
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Stop Reading News (2013)
Discover why constant news consumption makes us less informed and how to break free from information overload to think more clearly.
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Mozilla Raises Concerns Over Facebook’s Lack of Transparency
Today Denelle Dixon, Mozilla’s Chief Operating Officer, sent a letter to the European Commission surfacing concerns about the lack of publicly available
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Browser diversity starts with us
Developers, designers, and strategists, here’s something you can do for the health of the web: