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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 913 posts.
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The EARN IT act is an attack on end-to-end encryption
Yesterday a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators introduced a new bill called the EARN IT act. On its face, the bill seems like a bit of inside baseball having to do with legal liability for informati…
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DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
Google recently launched a desktop redesign. The favicon and URL breadcrumbs were turned into a header for organic search results. Ads had the same design, but were identified using the string "Ad" instead of the favicon. This design wasn't new. Google's mobile web search has served this design since May 2019. But…
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Who is Facebook's mysterious “Lan Tim 2”?
Facebook has an interesting feature. It will let you see which companies have associated your off-Facebook activity with your Facebook account. If you visit: https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/ you'll see what companies are snitching on you to Facebook. Alice St⭕️llmeyer@StollmeyerEU#AirBnB shares your…
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Stanford Medicine COVID-19 test now in use
The Stanford Clinical Virology Laboratory has deployed an in-house diagnostic test for the virus that causes COVID-19. Rapid identification of infected people could help limit the spread of the virus.
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Explaining copyright broke the YouTube copyright system
Update 5/6/24: A podcast recording of this same panel discussion has also been targeted multiple times on the Spotify platform. The Engelberg Center’s experiences with these are documented here .
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What are the mysterious light sources on light pollution maps?
I got my first telescope in 2017, in time for the Great American Eclipse. I started paying attention to the concept of light pollution, including finding detailed maps of what places had high or lo…
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Moznet IRC is dead; long live Mozilla Matrix
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
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Covid-19 precautions for Stripe employees and customers
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes
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Google Cloud Next 2020 – in person event cancelled
News and updates on Google Cloud's annual cloud computing conference.
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Adobe Summit Cancelled
Learn about digital trends, gain inspiration and bring the latest intelligence into your business. Explore more now.
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Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Tolkien Elves
Q: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Tolkien Elves Properly answering the following questions really doesn’t call for long blog posts. So I thought I would publish a simple FAQ-like…
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Economists study what happens when people stop using Facebook
In the most recent issue of the prestigious American Economic Review, a group of well-known economists published a paper titled “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” It ... Read more
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‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang
Australian Strategic Policy Institute2020255 points106 commentscited by 11Society, Policy & Culture details
‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang. What’s the problem? The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority1 citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs…
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Seeing the Smoke
Information on the coronavirus is widely available, and it doesn’t look positive. So why is everyone waiting for permission to do something about it?
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FCC Proposes to Fine Wireless Carriers $200M for Selling Customer Location Data
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today proposed fines of more than $200 million against the nation’s four largest wireless carriers for selling access to their customers’ location information without taking adequate precautions to prevent unauthorized access to that data. While the fines would be among…
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Your Man in the Public Gallery – Assange Hearing Day Four
Please try this experiment for me. Try asking this question out loud, in a tone of intellectual interest and engagement: “Are you suggesting that the two have the same effect?”. Now try asking this question out loud, in a tone of hostility and incredulity bordering on sarcasm: “Are you suggesting that the two have the…
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A Text Renaissance
There is a renaissance underway in online text as a medium. The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are: Roam , a hypertext publishing platform best…
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Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain
With more than 3.1 million views to date, “Night of the Living Dead” is among the most popular feature films on the Internet Archive. The 1968 movie is also generally acknowledged as one of the landmark films of the horror genre, as well as the work that single handedly created the modern conception of the
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Assange Hearing Day 3
In yesterday’s proceedings in court, the prosecution adopted arguments so stark and apparently unreasonable I have been fretting on how to write them up in a way that does not seem like caricature or unfair exaggeration on my part. What has been happening in this court has long moved beyond caricature. All I can do […]
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Study of 72,000 COVID-19 patients finds 2.3% death rate
Researchers from China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention today describe the clinical findings on more than 72,000 COVID-19 cases reported in mainland China, which reveal a case-fatality rate (CFR) of 2.3% and suggest most cases are mild, but the disease hits the elderly the hardest.
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DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
There’s a story in today’s Washington Post “Cybersecurity 202” newsletter that confirms that the Department of Justice is capitalizing on the techlash in order to build up congressional support for the DOJ’s long-desired goal of legislation that will restrict your freedom to encrypt your data and