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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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Facebook and PGP
Facebook just announced support for PGP, an encrypted email standard, for email from them to you. It’s an interesting move on many levels, albeit one that raises some interesting questions. The answers, and Facebook’s possible follow-on moves, are even more interesting.
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Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go from Here
The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by...
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Section 215 Expires For Now
Senate to Vote on USA FREEDOM Act Later in the WeekSection 215 has expired. At least for now.The law that the NSA used to authorize its collection of vast amounts of information about the telephone calls of ordinary Americans is no more. Even though it’s likely temporary, it’s a good thing and we...
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FBI doesnt want you to know it uses NSLs to correlate identities you use online
Back in March, I parsed the declaration Nicholas Merrill submitted in his bid to reveal the contents of what he was asked to turn over via an NSL back in 2004. As a reminder, here’s what FBI permitted Merrill to reveal at the beginning of this suit. And here’s Merrill’s description of what kind of […]
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Goodbye, Sourceforge
This page used to be a rant about SourceForge's shady practices around circa 2015, along with some basic comparison of other hosting services.
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The Backing Up of the Internet Archive Continues
A little over a month ago, I cooked up a grandiose plan with the Archive Team to back up the Internet Archive, and discussed what that might entail and how one might approach it. How’s that t…
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The responsibility we have as software engineers
I had the chance to chat this week with the very awesome Kate Heddleston who mentioned that she’s been thinking a lot about the ethics of being a software engineer, something she just spoke a…
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How Employers Get Out of Paying Their Workers
Employers illegally siphon billions of dollars out of low-wage workers' paychecks each year, but the vast majority of these crimes go unreported.
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Report on FBI’s Use of Patriot Act Highlights Need for Intelligence Reform
The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) yesterday released another report on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act between 2007 and 2009. The report was long delayed due to declassification and redaction issues, but the timing is...
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Why Mitch McConnell Cannot Be Allowed to Decide the Fate of the Patriot Act
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear this week that, while the Senate is rapidly approaching recess, the Senate “will stay in [session] until a deal is struck to extend” the Patriot Act. McConnell has also introduced legislation for both long-term and short-term reauthorization...
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Africa's Worst New Internet Censorship Law Could Be Coming to South Africa
Only once in a while does an Internet censorship law or regulation come along that is so audacious in its scope, so misguided in its premises, and so poorly thought out in its execution, that you have to check your calendar to make sure April 1 hasn't come around again. The Draft Online Regulation...
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Ta'izz
I wake up to a gorgeous morning in Ibb. This time I’ve slept through the morning call to prayer and the sun is well up in the sky. Out the window there’s a view of a regular city against a backdrop of green mountains, with some construction equipment in the near foreground, and it takes my groggy mind a minute to…
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I Want Your AOL CDs
Yes, yes I do. As you might expect, someone who does a lot of something (collecting) like I do, in a pretty public fashion, tends to get some pretty shiny-polished chestnuts tossed over the fence. …
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Internet.org Is Not Neutral, Not Secure, and Not the Internet
Facebook's Internet.org project, which offers people from developing countries free mobile access to selected websites, has been pitched as a philanthropic initiative to connect two thirds of the world who don’t yet have Internet access. We completely agree that the global digital divide should be...
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Thoughtcrime
Back to: The Ultimate Tech Frontier: Your Brain | Forward to: The Evil Business Plan of Evil (and misery for all)
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How to Ship a Beluga Whale via UPS
As a UPS cargo load master, Bland Matthews has been tasked with shipping everything from Terracotta Army soldiers to beluga whales.
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Silicon Valley hiring is not a meritocracy (2013)
Note: This post was adapted from an answer I wrote on Quora. EDIT: I’m working on something that I hope will make things better. Check out interviewing.io. I’ve been hiring people in some capacity for the past 3 years. First, I was doing it as an engineer, then as an in-house recruiter, and now as […]
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Be Kind
Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them.
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Update on Digital Rights Management and Firefox
A year ago, we announced the start of efforts to implement support for a component in Firefox that would allow content wrapped in Digital Rights Management
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UN Experts Say TPP and Fast Track Threaten Human Rights
Prominent experts at the United Nations have now indicated that secretive trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) undermine human rights around the world, both because of the secretive, corporate-dominated process, and due to the substantive content of the provisions that arise...
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EFF Asks Patent Office to Focus on Protecting Public from Bad Patents
This week, together with Public Knowledge and Engine, EFF submitted written comments to the Patent Office regarding its Patent Quality Initiative. We urge the Patent Office to ensure that this program actually reduces the number of invalid patents being issued. Its quality efforts should serve the...