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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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Wrong signal
In recent months, privacy and civil rights activists have increasingly recommended the use of Signal [1] , an instant messenger app developed by Open Whisper Systems (OWS). After Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in particular, many tweets recommended using hard disk encryption and the ostensibly…
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An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice Team
A couple of weeks ago I visited my mother back home in Norway. She had gotten a new laptop some time ago that my brother-in-law had set up for her. As usual when I come for a visit I was asked to look at some technical issues my mother was experiencing with her computer. Anyway,...
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European Court Strikes Down Law Allowing Users to Rip Their Own CDs
Today the High Court of the United Kingdom handed down an excellent decision—excellent because the result is so unreasonable, so out of touch with reality, and so divorced from the needs and expectations of ordinary users, that it provides a textbook illustration of the need for urgent reform of...
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The Ethical Failures Behind the Boeing Disasters
Two Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplanes crashed shortly after takeoff, on October 28, 2018 near Jakarta, Indonesia and March 10, 2019, near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The disasters cost the lives of 346 passengers and crew. Black box data recovered from the two planes indicate that bad engineering practices and surprisingly simple…
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Standing Up For Android
It seems these days you don’t have to go far to find people that want to belittle Android, often for reasons they feel are perfectly objective and valid. I’d call out Marco Arment and J…
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Venezuela's Internet Crackdown Escalates into Regional Blackout
For the last month, Venezuela has been caught up in widespread protests against its government. The Maduro administration has responded by cracking down on what it claims as being foreign interference online. As that social unrest has escalated, the state's censorship has widened: from the removal...
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Codeberg is moving and what this means to you
Codeberg is moving, and you can imagine, moving a mountain takes time and...
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Double Standards
Once people had recovered from the shock of seeing both a power button and a real-time clock on a Raspberry Pi, one of the most commented-on features of the new platform was the small, vertical, 16-way FFC (Flat Flexible Cable) connector on the left-hand side of the board, which exposes a single-lane PCI Express…
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Reasonably Secure Computing in the Decentralized World
Joanna Rutkowska recently gave a presentation titled “Reasonably Secure Computing in the Decentralized World (An Operating System Architect’s Perspective)” at a public event hosted by The Golem Project in Berlin, Germany called “Golem and Friends: Data, Security, Scaling and More….” The...
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Unsealed Filing Shows DOJ Misled Appeals Court About NSL Gag Orders
A court filing unsealed late Wednesday shows that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) made a highly misleading argument to an appeals court in October during a hearing on the constitutionality of National Security Letters (NSLs). On October 8, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued before the...
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Take It Down Act: A Flawed Attempt to Protect Victims That'll Lead to Censorship
Congress has begun debating the TAKE IT DOWN Act (S. 146), a bill that seeks to speed up the removal of a troubling type of online content: non-consensual intimate imagery, or NCII. In recent years, concerns have also grown about the use of digital tools to alter or create such images, sometimes...
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How Cook's Illustrated thrives while others are dying
Not all publications are on a financial deathwatch. Cook’s Illustrated takes no ads and charges for access to its recipes online. According to “Let’s Invent an iTunes for News,” the publication has 900,000 print subscribers (and 100,000 newsstand buyers) and is thriving online with …
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EFF to Supreme Court: Violating Terms of Service Isn’t a Crime Under the CFAA
Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and leading cybersecurity experts today urged the Supreme Court to rein in the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—and protect the security research we all rely on to keep us safe—by holding that accessing computers in ways that...
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Face-to-face interaction enhances learning, innovation
Faces transmit social information about goals and motivations that can help learners overcome the inherent difficulty of sharing a teacher's visual perspective, new Cornell psychology research finds.
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California Legislature Sells Out Our Data to ISPs
In the dead of night, the California Legislature shelved legislation that would have protected every Internet user in the state from having their data collected and sold by ISPs without their permission. By failing to pass A.B. 375, the legislature demonstrated that they put the profits of Verizon...
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Obama Administration Supports Privacy-Invasive “Cybersecurity” Bill
Right before Congress left for its annual summer vacation the Obama Administration endorsed the Senate Intelligence Committee's Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). EFF opposes the bill because its vague definitions, broad legal immunity, and new spying powers allow for a tremendous amount...
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U of California policy extends free access to all articles by UC employees
Today the University of California expands the reach of its research publications by issuing a Presidential Open Access Policy, allowing future scholarly articles authored by all UC employees to be freely shared with readers worldwide. Building on UC’s previously-adopted Academic Senate open access (OA) policies, this…
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Segment Open Fellowship
Twilio is always looking for ways to assist and contribute to open source. See our current open source projects and learn how you can get involved.
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Statement concerning the arrest of Dmitry Bogatov
[09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.10 released [09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.3 released [07 Oct 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.2 released [12 Aug 2017] DebConf17 closes in Montreal and DebConf18 dates announced [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.1 released [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.9 released [18 Jun 2017] Debian…
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It’s OK to block ads (2015)
Over the past couple of months, the practice of ad blocking has received heightened ethical scrutiny. (1,2,3,4) If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “ad blocking” refers to software—usually web browser plug-ins, but increasingly mobile apps—that stop most ads from appearing when you use websites or apps that would…
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Wikipedia Workers to Seek Union Recognition
COMMUNICATION WORKERS UNION 24/06/2026 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wikipedia workers in Britain are setting a “global first” by becoming the first body of workers at the online encyclopaedia to seek union recognition. British-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) wrote a letter to mana
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Social media is broken – a new report offers ways to fix it
A new report offers solutions to the problems that hound social media, from the spread of misinformation to the lack of competition.
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