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Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
Flock's 'licence plate readers' read much more than license plates. A judge says what they record must be released.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 992 posts.
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Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies
If delivered today, the last of Huxley’s 7-part lecture series at MIT would probably be categorised under motivational talks or self-help strategies. It surv...
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Are you stuck in movie logic?
Consider just saying what the problem is
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Where do the children play?
On the need for a world without us
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The internet is no longer a safe haven
A couple of days ago, the small server hosting this website was temporarily knocked out by scraping …
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Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit
offensive security & software engineering
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When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts
I try not to write anything even vaguely political on this blog because we have a variety of views on a variety of subjects and no one is ...
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Mag Wealth (2024)
Mag World: an intuitive sense of scale, using orders of magnitude
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Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today
Some time ago, we were contacted by a group fighting against online CSAM, demanding that AdGuard DNS blocks the Archive.today website. This was only the beginning of a much larger story…
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Bitchat for Gaza – messaging without internet
Bitchat is a new messaging app that allows users to chat securely with or without internet access. Download it today via the App Store or Google Play store to begin communicating safely, even when connectivity disappears. Why Bitchat is needed Palestinians are dependent on Israel for their access to electricity,
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Being poor vs. being broke
The more I speak about being poor, the more I realize how fundamentally other folks misunderstand what it means to be poor versus being broke.
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Mullvad VPN present And Then? (Chat Control is back on the menu)
Chat Control is back on the menu. To highlight the corruption behind the proposal, Mullvad VPN now presents "And Then?"
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Lawmakers want to ban VPNs
It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of…
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The Monks in the Casino
A brief theory of young men, "the loneliness crisis," and life in the 21st century
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How many video games include a marriage proposal? At least one
Also: World League Basketball
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Chat Control 2.0 through the back door
Just before a decisive meeting in Brussels, digital rights expert and former Member of the European Parliament Dr. Patrick Breyer is sounding the alarm. Using a "deceptive sleight of hand," a mandatory and expanded Chat Control is being pushed through the back door, in a form even more intrusive tha
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You will own nothing and be (un)happy
Hi! I'm a raccoon, and this is my trash can :] It's full of my thoughts about the mess of being human. No human is perfect, including me, and that's why we are so fascinating.
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Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
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The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed
Last week the Department of War finally killed the last vestiges of Robert McNamara’s 1962 Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). The DoW has pivoted from optimizing cost and performa…
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I hate screenshots of text
Why do people take screenshots of text?
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The Future of Fact-Checking Is Lies, I Guess
Last weekend I was trying to pull together sources for an essay and kept finding “fact check” pages from factually.co . For instance, a Kagi search for “pepper ball Chicago pastor” returned this Factually article as the second result:
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How cops can get your private online data
Can the cops get your online data? In short, yes. There are a variety of US federal and state laws which give law enforcement powers to obtain information that you provided to online services. But, there are steps you as a user and/or as a service provider can take to improve online privacy.Law...
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LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
ChatGPT and LLMs amplify both insight and illusion. They are not knowledge engines, but confidence engines shaping how we think and learn.
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Time to start de-Appling
I ‘ve done such a thorough job of de-Googling that I forgot to show up for a meeting with someone, because I hadn’t checked my Google calendar in ages. (No, they were not amused.) In my defense, I proceeded to explain to them that having de-Googled, I was also in the process of de-Appling, which is a special bonus…
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IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act
A follow up to The Ofcom Files. Some notes on Ofcom’s strategy to date. As many of you know, I represent the U.S. website 4chan, pro bono, in its U.S. federal lawsuit against the UK…
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I Want You to Understand Chicago
Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his…