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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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Alleged $7.5B fraud in online advertising
Online advertising is often based around the idea of an "impression," but few of us actually know what that means. We assume it means some sort of interaction with a human being, but as it turns out, we're quite wrong. Today we dive into some staggering statistics with Samuel Scott.
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What’s the best way to spend $20K to help the common good?
I recently came across the following question posted by Paul Buchheit (the founder of Gmail): Assume that I'm going to get rid of $20,000 and my only concern is the "common good". Which of these is the best use of the money: give it to the Gates foundation, buy a hybrid car, invest it in a promising startup, invest it…
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ICANN's assault on personal and small business privacy
This post is extremely long and detailed and is on quite a dense subject. Here is the short version.
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Users Betrayed as Australia Adopts a Copyright Censorship Regime
Since our report last week on Australia's Internet censorship bill, the bill did indeed pass the Senate yesterday, and will become the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act 2015. The new law provides an accelerated process for rightsholders to obtain court orders for ISPs to block sites...
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Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
These policies are not just dumb in retrospect; typically there were people who understood a lot about such policies and who had good reasons to disapprove of them beforehand. It seems hard to imagine such policies being adopted nearly as often if everyone knew what such "experts" knew about their consequences. Thus…
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Happy 10th birthday to us
Get the latest product news, company announcements, and user insights from the official Reddit blog.
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Greece’s Proposals to End the Crisis
The only antidote to propaganda and malicious ‘leaks’ is transparency. After so much disinformation on my presentation at the Eurogroup of the Greek government’s position, the only response is to post the precise words uttered within. Read them and judge for yourselves whether the Greek government’s proposals…
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European Court Strikes Down Law Allowing Users to Rip Their Own CDs
Today the High Court of the United Kingdom handed down an excellent decision—excellent because the result is so unreasonable, so out of touch with reality, and so divorced from the needs and expectations of ordinary users, that it provides a textbook illustration of the need for urgent reform of...
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EFF, CloudFlare Asks Court Not to Force the Internet to Enforce Trademarks
This month, CloudFlare and EFF pushed back against major music labels’ latest strategy to force Internet infrastructure companies like CloudFlare to become trademark and copyright enforcers, by challenging a broad court order that the labels obtained in secret. Unfortunately, the court denied...
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Why Facebook Failed Our Censorship Test
If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship. For example, Facebook restricted access to three items of content on its...
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EFF and Eight Other Privacy Orgs Back Out of NTIA Face Recognition Talks
EFF, along with eight other consumer-focused privacy advocacy organizations, has backed out of the National Telecommunications Information Administration’s multi-stakeholder process to develop a privacy-protective code of conduct for companies using face recognition. After 16 months of active...
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I Do Not Agree to Your Terms
Apple introduced their News app at WWDC, and the other day they sent me an e-mail saying they want to include this blog in News.
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Reasons the MI6 Story Is a Lie
The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie. 1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by…
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Questions about the Sunday Times Snowden Story
Official website for UK-based journalist Ryan Gallagher.
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Why the US federal employee record breach is worse than others
During the week of June 8th, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced that the records of all current and past US federal employees had been compromised. That includes standard employment information - address, social security numbers, etc - of over 4 million people ranging from a random forest ranger to US…
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30% of US Workforce Need License to Perform Their Job
Nearly 30 percent of workers in the U.S. need a license to perform their job. It is important to realize that occupational licenses are not mere state-sponsored certificates to signal that workers have completed some level of training; occupational licensing laws forbid people from practicing in their occupation…
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What the Next Generation Needs Is Math, Not Programming
It is the intelligent analysis of information that would be critical in a decade from now.
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Reassessing Airport Security
News that the Transportation Security Administration missed a whopping 95% of guns and bombs in recent airport security “red team” tests was justifiably shocking. It’s clear that we’re not getting value for the $7 billion we’re paying the TSA annually. But there’s another conclusion, inescapable and disturbing to…
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They Took Our Myths
Back to: A product review, and some musing | Forward to: What's The Best Medium For A Storyteller In 2015 And Beyond?
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Is Social Rejection the Key to Creativity?
On the psychology of why rejection and loneliness may be necessary evils for the creative genius
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HTML is done
Item: The W3C HTML Working Group charter is expiring . Item: Discussion on what to do is inconclusive . Item: Things are pretty quiet in the WhatWG. Conclusion: The best thing to do about HTML is nothing .
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Against Tulip Subsidies
I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered…
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California, Water You Doing?
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
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UN Experts Condemn the Human Rights Costs of Secret Trade Agreements
Yesterday, ten United Nations experts and special rapporteurs voiced their concern over the adverse impacts upon human rights posed by secret “free trade” and investment agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade...
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What Twitter Can Be
Disclaimers: 1) This is a very long read. Thinking about a company and using its product obsessively for nine years straight will do that to you. 2) My funds and I own a lot of Twitter stock. 3) I do not … Continue reading →