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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
Update: You did it! After a forceful debate on Monday 26 January, in which many peers protested the introduction of these amendments, Lord Blair withdrew them from consideration. Directly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, we cautioned the public and politicians to be "wary of any attempt to rush...
Yesterday, we blacked out the default start page in Firefox and redirected visitors to the Mozilla sites to a special action page. We also sent direct mess
The HN community feels like it owns HN, and we like it that way. HN has become an important institution in the tech community, and though it was initially developed for YC founders it’s clearly evolved into much more than that. We’ve always felt that the best way for HN to benefit YC is simply for it to maximally…
Along with Threema, Tresorit, and Tutanota, we are releasing a joint statement calling on the EU to reject any ban or attack on end-to-end encryption.
Free and open-source software underpins the digital world. Federal funding should prioritize its development and maintenance.
A new book examines the massive health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees.
We confirm that in 2020 and 2021 we observed and notified the government of the United Kingdom of multiple suspected instances of Pegasus spyware infections within official UK networks, including the Prime Minister’s Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
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…
WEI? I’m a frayed knotTwo pieces of string walk into a bar.The first piece of string asks for a drink.The bartender says, “Get lost. We don’t serve pieces of string.”The second string ties a knot in his middle and messes up his ends. Then he orders a drink. The bartender says, “Hey, you aren’t a...
Good news out of the Ninth Circuit: the federal court of appeals heeded EFF’s advice and rejected an attempt by Oracle to hold a company criminally liable for accessing Oracle’s website in a manner it didn’t like. The court ruled back in 2012 that merely violating a website’s terms of use is not a...
As part of the Internet Archive's aim to build a better Web, we have been working to make the Web more reliable -- and are pleased to announce that 9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the Wayback Machine. 22 Wikipedia Language Editions with more than
We've heard you: "Fix the Wayback Machine!" Here's what's going on. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we've put protections in place to keep the service running. One recent change: we rewrote the message you see when a request is blocked with a 429 error…
$ git push ... remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (2/2), completed with 2 local objects. remote: error: GH013: Your push could infringe someone's copyright. remote: If you believe this is a…
We have a problem when it comes to stopping mass surveillance. The entity that’s conducting the most extreme and far-reaching surveillance against most of the world’s communications—the National Security Agency—is bound by United States law. That’s good news for Americans. U.S. law and the...
Last week the Internet Archive upped our bandwidth capacity 30%, based on increased usage and increased financial support. Thank you. This is our outbound bandwidth graph that has several stories to tell… A year ago, usage was 30Gbits/sec. At the beginning of this year, we were at 40Gbits/sec, and we were handling it…
In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing "Talk" platform with a new one called "Hangouts" that sharply diminishes...
Today, Google's services experienced a limited outage for about 27 minutes over some portions of the Internet. The reason this happened dives into the deep, dark corners of networking.
Apple's anti-competitive App Store policies are gouging consumers, enabling censorship, and harming privacy-focused developers. We're joining a lawsuit to restore internet freedom.
Germany opposes client-side scanning planned by EU - it would create an unprecedented surveillance monster that violates fundamental rights.
The U.K. Parliament has passed the Online Safety Bill (OSB), which says it will make the U.K. “the safest place” in the world to be online. In reality, the OSB will lead to a much more censored, locked-down internet for British users. The bill could empower the government to undermine not just the privacy and security…
Posted by Jacob Kaplan-Moss on March 19, 2013
In The Big Short, investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” Based on that assumption, Burry shorted the mania- and …
