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Google News to shut down in Spain
After 9/11, one of our engineers, Krishna Bharat, realized that results for the query “World Trade Center” returned nothing about the terror...
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 210 posts.
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Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose
It's official: the last holdout for the open web has fallen. Flanked on all sides by Google, Microsoft, Opera, and (it appears) Safari's support and promotion of the EME DRM-in-HTML standard, Mozilla is giving in to pressure from Hollywood, Netflix, et al, and will be implementing its own third-...
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Why Everyone Should be Concerned By the Seizure of MyRedBook.com
Last week, an online community for sex workers disappeared from the Internet. Visit SFRedbook.com, MyPinkBook.com, or MyRedBook.com right now, and you’ll only find the seals of the law enforcement agencies—the FBI, the DOJ, and the IRS—that seized the sites as part of a prostitution and money...
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Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber
Brian Carver co-authored this post. Between the net neutrality debate and the Comcast/TWC merger, high-speed Internet access is getting more attention than ever. A lot of that attention is negative, and rightly so: Internet access providers, especially certain very large ones, have done a pretty...
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Dear Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help
Donate a Few Hours to Help Us Create a Free Software Backend for Contacting Congress, Make the World a Better Place for Digital Rights UPDATE (4/16/14): We're lowering the threshold for getting prizes, take a look below. For years, EFF has been helping concerned technology users contact Congress....
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An Update on Hacker News
I frequently get asked about the changes we’ve made and are making to Hacker News, so I wanted to share some updates. A lot of people feel strongly about HN. It’s an important part of the startup community and we want it to be both the best source of news and discussion about technology and startups and also welcoming…
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Wayback Machine Hits 400,000,000,000
The Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web, has reached a landmark with 400 billion webpages indexed. This makes it possible to surf the web as it looked anytime from late 1996 up until a few hours ago. Let’s take a trip back in time and visit some sites. Yahoo (Captured way back
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EFF Asks Judge to Rule NSA Internet Backbone Spying Techniques Unconstitutional
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today presented a federal court with a detailed explanation of how the NSA taps into the Internet backbone and requested the judge rule that the agency is violating the Fourth Amendment by copying and searching the collected data. EFF argues...
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The World Health Organization calls for the decriminalisation of drug use
Transform Drug Policy Foundation is an independent charity working towards a safer system of legal regulation for all drugs. When we legalise and regulate drugs that are currently illegal we can take the power away from organised crime and establish safety controls.
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Tor exit node operator prosecuted in Austria
June 30th, 2014 marks a turning point for Austria. Not only was the Vorratsdatenspeicherung (data retention) terminated preliminarily for good (no, really), the operation of TOR exit nodes supposedly was also declared a criminal offense by a regional criminal court. The accused was operating a TOR exit node which was…
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The Government is Silencing Twitter and Yahoo, and It Won't Tell Us Why
The government is using shaky legal arguments to silence major Internet companies without giving them – or the public – the opportunity to respond. In three separate recent cases, the government has sent a grand jury subpoena to Yahoo or Twitter and requested a gag order from a magistrate judge, attempting to bar…
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We are throttling the FCC to dialup modem speeds until they pay us for bandwidth
Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I've (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC's internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site.
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IE7 users, we need to talk…
In 2014 we dropped support for Internet Explorer 7 — and offered to buy a new computer for any customer stuck on it. The offer has long since closed.
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Abstract software patents struck down by Supreme Court
In a long-awaited decision, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank today, striking down an abstract software patent. Essentially, the Court ruled that adding “on a computer” to an abstract idea does not make it patentable. Many thousands of software patents—particularly the...
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India’s Downward Spiral
How India is losing its footing on free expression. The world’s biggest democracy is a formidable power in the IT sector. With software exports comprising approximately ten percent of India’s total GDP and a technology sector that employs more than 2.5 million people, India is poised to become a...
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Independence Day
The latest news and stories about how technology is helping people around the world solve problems, innovate and do more each day.
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State Laws That Stop Cities From Installing Fast Internet
For decades, municipal broadband operations have been subject to a minefield of restrictions and barriers designed to make the prospect of establishing or maintaining a community broadband network costly, difficult, and unsustainable. The Biden administration initially pledged that the Broadband Equity, Access, and…
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Court Rules No Suspicion Needed for Laptop Searches at Border
Decision Dismisses ACLU Lawsuit Challenging DHS Search Policy as Unconstitutional...
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Yahoo breaks every mailing list in the world including the IETF's
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New NSA Documents Shine More Light into Black Box of Executive Order 12333
What is arguably the most powerful of the U.S. government’s surveillance authorities is also the most secretive, and it operates with the least amount of oversight.