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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
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Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
The US government has issued an export control directive suspending all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by foreign nationals inside or outside the US.
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Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
A statement from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War and national security uses of AI.
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YouTube-dl's repository has been restored
Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
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Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
During the Asia-Pacific Grandmasters broadcast over the weekend there was a competition rule violation during a post-match interview.
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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
My smartest friends have bananas arguments about LLM coding.
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Apple's plan to “think different” about encryption opens a backdoor to your life
Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system.
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Keep Android Open
This Week in F-Droid TWIF curated on Friday, 20 Feb 2026, Week 8 F-Droid core During our talks with F-Droid users at FOSDEM26 we were baffled to learn most w...
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Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union
Apple announced changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store impacting developers’ apps in the EU to comply with the DMA.
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Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional
Government Must Have Reasonable Suspicion of Digital Contraband Before Searching Electronic Devices at the U.S. Border
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Request For Research: Basic Income
We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research. We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would…
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Google’s GDPR Workaround
Brave presents new RTB evidence, and has uncovered a mechanism by which Google appears to be circumventing its purported GDPR privacy protections.
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It’s Time to Build
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the cause on one…
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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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Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
Openly sharing your work brings more attention to it, which is good, right? The answer, for me though, is often “it’s complicated.” This is what happened when I went to visit a giant tech company, in hopes for collaboration, but later found that they tried to patent some of my research instead!
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Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
The design of "technical interviews" is hurting the tech sector.
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Richard M. Stallman resigns
The board will be conducting a search for a new president, beginning immediately. Further details of the search will be published on fsf.org.
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UC terminates subscriptions with Elsevier in push for open access
As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC…
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GitHub is fully available in Iran
All developers should be free to use GitHub, no matter where they live. At the same time, GitHub respects and abides by US law, which means government sanctions have limited our ability to provide developers in some countries the full range of GitHub services.
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Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data
In 2025, Google gave Amandla Thomas-Johnson's data to ICE without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena, breaking a nearly decade-long promise to notify users before handing their data to law enforcement.
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Your phone is about to stop being yours
Your phone is about to stop being yours. In 2027, Google will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with them.
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We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won
We don’t plan to settle, and if brought into such litigation again in the future, we think we have a pretty good blueprint for how to respond.
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Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
Google and many others are joining together to call on the FCC to preserve the open internet. Together, we can make our voices heard and we can make a difference.
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Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
TL;DR: Ethereum will use at least ~99.95% less energy post merge. Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which...
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Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Patty Smith.