The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 952 posts.
Research published yesterday by several European media outlets has revealed that an international campaign in support of the EU's proposed child sexual abuse regulation has been largely orchestrated and financed by a network of organisations with links to the tech industry and security services. The
Ten years ago today, on Friday, October 18, 2013, the effort to fix HealthCare.gov began in earnest. At 7:15 A.M. Eastern time, a small group assembled next to the entrance to the West Wing of the White House. The group included Todd Park, Brian...
Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty ...
This week brought another self-inflected wound for trust in journalism.
[Image: From Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe].While watching Die Hard the other night—easily one of the best architectural films of …
This morning, two emails came in from Apple. The first was about the upcoming renewal of my yearly subscription to Disney+ and the second email was about the price increase of my Disney+ subscription from $79.99 to $109.99. It took me all of 10 seconds to think about it, but I canceled my subscription. It’s not really…
Meta's ad bots flagged Python and Pandas courses as live-animal sales, then auto-rejected the appeal. Why the 180-day data retention policy makes it permanent.
[There is very lively discussion on Reddit, where it’s trending at #1 both on r/ios and r/apple . There are a bunch of worthy suggestions there on how to improve the feature even more, but one thing’s clear: iPhone users would love to see this come to more devices.]
Today, the Colorado Supreme Court became the first state supreme court in the country to address the constitutionality of a keyword warrant—a digital dragnet tool that allows law enforcement to identify everyone who searched the internet for a specific term or phrase. In a weak and ultimately...
The main reason for IF Metall to take industrial action at Tesla is to ensure that our members have decent and safe working conditions. Over a long period of time, we have attempted to discuss with Tesla the signing of a collective agreement, yet without success. Now we see no solution other than to take industrial…
We have come to a point where end-to-end encrypting all your private data and private communications
Enshittification is the process by which a platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):
"I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one." The now-famous quip from Robert Reich cuts to the bone of corporate personhood. Corporations are people with speech rights. They are heat-shields that absorb liability on behalf of their owners and managers.
We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. . . . Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated…
We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.
Stanford Center for Internet and Society2023119 points147 commentscited by 3Society, Policy & Culture details
Recently, Wired reported on documents leaked in May from the Council of the European Union’s ongoing deliberations over the draft Child Sex Abuse Regulation. The proposal is controversial because, as presently written, it would require online service providers to proactively scan their services – including users’…
The gavel has fallen; the cup has been stomped; pick your metaphor. Microsoft has succeeded in its almost-two-year quest to gobble up Activision. The peculiar side effect in my corner of the world is that Microsoft now owns the dusty remains ...
A Special Edition of The Ruffian
The European Commission wants to turn digital communication apps, such as WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram, TikTok and X, into mass surveillance tools so that digital communications of all EU citizens, including their live conversations, photos and videos, can be automatically scanned for criminal offences.[1] Even of…
By making a minor concession EU governments hope to find a majority next week to approve the controversial „chat control“ bill. According to the proposed child sexual abuse regulation (CSAR), providers of messengers, e-mail and chat services would be forced to automatically search all private messag
The proposal of the European Commission for a regulation on preventing and combatting the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children is currently discussed in Dutch parliament. I recently wrote about some concerns and the risk of a DDoS attack . It turns out it is also possible to taint the database of images of…
New information coming to light in Amazon and meat price-fixing antitrust cases shows inflation is probably being driven by consolidation in the form of data sharing.
Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal. This is hard to understand.
Less automation and less agony
On the 11th of October, Dutch parliament organized a hearing on the EU “Chatcontrol” proposal, with a focus on client side scanning. Dutch parliament had earlier passed two motions calling on the Dutch government not to support this proposal, but our government has declared it will ignore those motions. This hearing…
Sixty-three percent of Americans say a third U.S. political party is needed, up from 56% a year ago and by one percentage point the highest in Gallup's 20-year trend.
How many cardiac arrest survivors later have a conscious recollection of their death experience—and are their recollections accurate?
