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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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Ghost Streets of Los Angeles
architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures
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Court: Breaking Your Employer's Computer Policy Isn't a Crime
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion rejecting the government’s attempt to hold an employee criminally liable under the federal hacking statute—the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”)—for violating his employer-imposed computer use restrictions. The decision...
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The Loading Screen Game Patent Finally Expires
In 1998, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent 5,718,632, on a method for avoiding “unnecessary wastage of time” in video games. What’s transpired in the 17 years since then can best be described as an unnecessary wastage of time. Namco’s patent covers “auxiliary games” that a player...
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TPP Threatens Security and Safety by Locking Down US Policy on Source Code Audit
Multiple recent reports on serious security vulnerabilities in cable modems and routers paint a dire picture of the state of security of the devices that millions of users depend upon to connect to the Internet. Such vulnerabilities can be exploited to disable our access, snoop on our personal...
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The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work
Abstract: Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to…
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Jury Duty
There are twelve of us left. The first thing the prosecutor did during voir dire was ask all the men of color whether we trusted cops…
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Google Deceptively Tracks Students’ Internet Browsing, EFF Says in FTC Complaint
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Google for collecting and data mining school children’s personal information, including their Internet searches—a practice EFF uncovered while researching its “Spying on...
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A Decade-Old Gag Order, Lifted
More than a decade ago, a man named Nick Merrill approached the NYCLU and ACLU with an unusual request for help. At the time, Nick ran a small Internet access and consulting business, called Calyx, in New York City.
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This is what a Tor Supporter looks like: Laura Poitras
The first thing that Laura Poitras has to say about Tor is that she couldn’t have made...
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To defend the free web, save Mozilla
The latest version of this post, along with the blog, has moved. TL;DR: Mozilla is largely dependent on Yahoo! We must make sure it is funded by individuals’ donations and a diverse roster of…
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Things the media does to manufacture outrage
People are so sensitive these days! People are just offended by every little thing! Millennials, amirite?!
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The Secret Ingredient in Orange Juice
Do you buy orange juice at the store? If you do, I'm sure you're careful to buy the kind that's 100% juice and not made from concentrate. After all, that's the healthier kind, right? The more natural kind? The kind without any additives? The kind that's sold in the refrigerator section so it must be almost as good as…
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Difficult Times at Our Credit Union
Brewster Kahle, Chairman of the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union, November 2015 [NYtimes story, Motherboard, BoingBoing. Liquidation.] All deposits are safe, all loans performing, great and dedicated staff, wonderful members. So why difficult? Despite five years of effort, $1 million in donations spent (from the…
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What can a technologist do about climate change?
Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities , I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable). Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our…
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Where to hate daylight saving time and where to love it
Update: a newer version of this little project helps you make your complaints about daylight saving time—whether they’re for or against it—with clearer messages about whether keeping DST, abolishing it, or making it permanent would be best for your daylight preferences. Give it a whirl over at Observable.
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How to Be a Lawyer Without Going to Law School
A handful of lawyers practice law in the United States without a law degree, bypassing three years of hell (and thousands of dollars in college debt). Here's how.
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Happy Little Words – Analyzing the Bob Ross Twitch Chat
In late October the video game streaming site Twitch.tv launched "Twitch Creative" , essentially giving people permission to stream non-video game related creative content on the site. To celebrate the launch they streamed all 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross in a giant marathon.
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Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
Like clockwork, cynical calls to expand mass surveillance practices—by continuing the domestic telephone records collection and restricting access to strong encryption—came immediately following the Paris attacks. These calls came before the smoke had even cleared, much less before a serious...
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A Step Toward Protecting Fair Use on YouTube
Posted by Fred von Lohmann, Copyright Legal Director More than 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Some of those upl...
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Police Civil Asset Forfeitures Exceed All Burglaries in 2014
Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually.