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Don't Panic: Seeking Points of Agreement on the “Going Dark” Debate
Don't Panic: Seeking Points of Agreement on the
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 304 posts.
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Zen Magnets Wins CPSC Case
TL;DR: Zen Magnets won the 2014 hearing. Judge concludes proper use of magnets creates no danger. Some recalls . Still no Zen Magnets to sell.
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A Statement from The Tor Project on Software Integrity and Apple
The Tor Project exists to provide privacy and anonymity for millions of people, including human...
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Hillary and Bernie’s Quiet Email Battle
SendGrid's trusted email API and marketing campaigns platform is now available through Twilio.com.
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Why Unicode Won’t Work on the Internet (2001)
Linguistic, Political, and Technical Limitations.
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EFF Sues for Court Orders Requiring Tech Cos to Decrypt Users’ Communications
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit today against the Justice Department to shed light on whether the government has ever used secret court orders to force technology companies to decrypt their customers’ private communications, a...
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The $50,000 San Francisco Home
Breaking down the numbers to construct a truly affordable housing model.
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Apple Fight Could Lead to “Virtually Limitless” Surveillance Powers, Judge Warns
At stake in Apple's fight against government orders to break open locked iPhones could be the legal authorization for “virtually limitless” surveillance under the Internet of Things, according to a federal judge's order rejecting a government request in a New York drug case yesterday. Midway...
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Our statement on the results of the Jacob Appelbaum investigation
Seven weeks ago, I published a blog post saying that Jacob Appelbaum had left the Tor Project,...
282
Amateur Radio Parity Act Passes in the US House of Representatives
The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.
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Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999)
Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.1 Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming
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Why some businesses aren't allowed on Stripe
We’re building business infrastructure. As with other kinds of infrastructure (like hosting or electricity), we'd like to make it available to as broad a set of users as possible.
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Famines
In many parts of the world famines have been common in the past. What causes famines? How can famines be averted?
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Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?
In fiscal year 2024, the federal government spent $6.9 trillion, amounting to 24 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), according to the June 2024 estimates of the Congressional...
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Life Expectancy
People are living longer across the world, but large differences remain. Explore global data on life expectancy and how it has changed over time.
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The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground
After more than four decades of serving as the nation's economic majority, the U.S. middle class is now matched in size by those in the economic tiers above and below it.
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U.S. lags behind peer countries in mobility
The notion that anyone in America who is willing and able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” can achieve significant upward mobility is deeply embedded in U.S. society. Conventional wisdom holds that class barriers in the United States are the lowest among the world’s advanced economies. Motivating this…
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Economic Inequality
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?
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Trademark Law Does Not Require Companies To Tirelessly Censor the Internet
Over the past few days, EFF and one of our staff technologists, the talented Micah Lee, have had an illuminating back and forth with Canonical Ltd over the use of the Ubuntu mark. While we don’t believe that Canonical has acted with malice or intent to censor, its silly invocation of trademark law...
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Behind Trump’s victory: Divisions by race, gender, education
Donald Trump's win followed a campaign that revealed deep divisions that were as wide and in some cases wider than in previous elections.
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Human Height
The average height of a population can inform us about the nutrition and living conditions of populations in the past for which we have little other data.
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Who Owns the Federal Reserve Banks?
Is the Fed public or private? It's both: the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations.
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Against Intellectual Property
Would a libertarian society recognize patents as legitimate? What about copyright? In Against Intellectual Property, Stephan Kinsella, a patent attorney of many
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Russia's “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model
Russia's propaganda model is high-volume and multichannel, and it disseminates messages without regard for the truth. It is rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it does not commit to consistency.
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Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?
False positives cause many promising detection technologies to be unworkable in practice. Attackers, we show, face this problem too. In deciding who to attack true positives are targets successfully attacked, while false positives are those that are attacked but yield nothing. This allows us to view the attacker’s…
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Hunger and Undernourishment
What are the consequences of undernourishment and how can we make progress against hunger and undernourishment?
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Guns and suicide: A fatal link
In the United States, suicides outnumber homicides almost two to one. Perhaps the real tragedy behind suicide deaths—about 30,000 a year, one for every 45