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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 695 posts.
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Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you
TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. "nom nom" . This blog post is not for you.
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Patent Troll Forced To Settle Frivolous Lawsuit Against One-Man Business
This story will circulate a lot today. I’d like to suggest a more informative and accurate headline than the likely “Lodsys dismisses a lawsuit and donates to charity”.
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Restoring Trust in Government and the Internet
In July 2012, responding to allegations that the video-chat service Skype—owned by Microsoft—was changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, Corporate Vice President Mark Gillett took to the company’s blog to deny it. Turns out that wasn’t quite true. Or at least he—or the…
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EFF: "Parallel construction" is really intelligence laundering
UPDATE: Add the IRS to the list of federal agencies obtaining information from NSA surveillance. Reuters reports that the IRS got intelligence tips from DEA's secret unit (SOD) and were also told to cover up the source of that information by coming up with their own independent leads to recreate...
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Wild Ideas
A wild idea is one that many people think is obviously quite unlikely. I'd say at least a third of these wild ideas are likely true. (Parenthetic links are to more of my writings .)
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Goldman Sachs sent a computer scientist to jail over 8MB of open source code
In 2009, a brilliant software engineer Sergey Aleynikov was arrested by the FBI at Newark Liberty International Airport. The allegation? He stole Goldman Sachs source code, about 8 megabytes of it....
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Xerox scanners and photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents
Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents Please see the “condensed time line” section (the next one) for a time line of how the Xerox saga unfolded. It for example depicts that I did not push the thing to the public right away, but gave Xerox a lot of time before I did so. <iframe…
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Open letter to Sal Khan
Dear Mr. Khan, A year ago, I expressed my concerns on the Washington Post’s blog that your decimal place value videos and exercises failed to incorporate very basic knowledge about how people…
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MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case
Professors Hal Abelson and Peter Diamond complete review.
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Wired Love: a novel from 1880 that could have been written last week
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
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The American-Western European Values Gap
American values differ from those of Western Europeans in many important ways. Most notably, Americans are more individualistic and are less supportive of a strong safety net than are the publics of Spain, Britain, France and Germany. However, Americans are coming closer to Europeans in not seeing their culture as…
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Chomsky praises Snowden and condemns US hypocrisy
Typically eloquent Noam Chomsky, speaking this weekend at the Geneva Press Club: My own opinion is that Snowden should be honored. He was doing what every citizen ought to do, telling. [Applause] He was telling Americans what the government was doing. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Governments as I mentioned before…
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