The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
After the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture cracked down on a community seed library, hundreds of seed libraries in the U.S. are suddenly wondering if they are breaking the law. According to PA regulators, in order to give out member-donated seeds, the Simpson Seed Library in Cumberland County would have to put…
I. From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:”There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought …
The origins of the use of [x] in UI design.
A handful of Brooklyn Law students forced a patent troll to drop a meritless lawsuit.
On our tenth birthday we can look back on a year in which our free and open world map has gone from strength to strength, being deployed by large companies such as Apple, Mapquest and Foursquare, and relief organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and the American Red Cross.
Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”: The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration. The article cites…
A few weeks ago we fought a battle for transparency in our flagship NSA spying case, Jewel v. NSA. But, ironically, we weren't able to tell you anything about it until now. On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on...
I am home. My dog is happy to see me. The world is a good place and I am behind on work because American Airlines doesn't have proper power ...
Buckyballs settled their lawsuit months ago . And news of Magnicube’s settlement comes today . They’re both out of the fight.
I love MIT but confess being frustrated . The MITx announcement added to my frustration. As outlined below, I argued against OpenCourseWare (OCW) before it was announced. I was not persuasive and lost the debate. My view of how MIT should take advantage of the digital revolution was unusual then, but is more common…
The Sophos Blog
Brian Carver co-authored this post. Between the net neutrality debate and the Comcast/TWC merger, high-speed Internet access is getting more attention than ever. A lot of that attention is negative, and rightly so: Internet access providers, especially certain very large ones, have done a pretty...
Here at EFF, we see a lot of stupid patents. There was the patent on “scan to email.” And the patent on “bilateral and multilateral decision making.” There are so many stupid patents that Mark Cuban endowed a chair at EFF dedicated to eliminating them. We wish we could catalog them all, but with...
Let's transform an old airport site into a Traditional City.
Making fake cash is a risky line of work -- even if it's as a certified Hollywood prop master.
Many people have been writing about Google this week - either in response to the Newsweek cover story , or to the recent Wired article about Google’s growing pains, and its happy motto: “Don’t be evil”.
The Traditional City simply refers to the pattern of development that human civilization has built in for millenia.
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today presented a federal court with a detailed explanation of how the NSA taps into the Internet backbone and requested the judge rule that the agency is violating the Fourth Amendment by copying and searching the collected data. EFF argues...
