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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 268 posts.
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The time has come to stand up for the GPL
The Software Freedom Conservancy provides a non-profit home and services to Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.
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What taking my daughter to a comic book store taught me
I like to think that I'm a pretty decent human being. Don't think I didn't hear that snort of derision...lighten up - I didn't say "perfect", I just said "prett
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Automakers Say You Don’t Really Own Your Car
EFF is fighting for vehicle owners’ rights to inspect the code that runs their vehicles and to repair and modify their vehicles, or have a mechanic of their choice do the work. At the moment, the anti-circumvention prohibition in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act arguably restricts vehicle...
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An Open Letter to Tim Cook Regarding the App Store 70/30 Revenue Split
The official blog of the AnyList team.
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Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock
With a heavy heart Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock, stalwart proponent of Free Open Source Software, Father, Son, and the 'ian' in Debian. Ian started the Debian project in August of 1993, releasing the first versions of Debian later...
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TPP banning requirements to transfer or access to source code of software
This is a video by Zack Struver about Senator Bernie Sander’s proposal to expand Veterans access to patented medical inventions. The video discusses both the proposal by Senator Sanders to give the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs the authority to… Continue Reading →
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YouTube Ditches Flash, and It Hardly Matters
Last week, Google announced that its Youtube service would default to using HTML5 video instead of Flash. Once upon a time, this would have been cause for celebration: after all, Flash is a proprietary technology owned by one company, a frequent source of critical vulnerabilities that expose...
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Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
Like clockwork, cynical calls to expand mass surveillance practices—by continuing the domestic telephone records collection and restricting access to strong encryption—came immediately following the Paris attacks. These calls came before the smoke had even cleared, much less before a serious...
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The Web’s Cruft Problem
The Web's Cruft Problem is out. Stay connected to Telerik Blogs for .NET, JavaScript, cross-platform app development (and beyond) news and tutorials.
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Paul Kalanithi, writer and neurosurgeon, dies at 37
Paul Kalanithi wrote essays for The New York Times and Stanford Medicine reflecting on being a physician and a patient, the human experience of facing death, and the joy he found despite terminal illness.
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Microsoft’s new small print – how your personal data is abused
Microsoft has renewed its Privacy Policy and Service Agreement. The new services agreement goes into effect on 1 August 2015, only a couple of days after the launch of the Windows 10 operating system on 29 July. The new “privacy dashboard” is presented to give the users a possibility to control their data related to…
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Users Have Been Betrayed in the Final TPP Deal
Trade negotiators from the U.S. and its 11 Pacific Rim partners announced their agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) today, concluding the final round of closed negotiations in Atlanta and marking the culmination of seven years of secrecy. Throughout all that time, the U.S....
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Why we will not be registering easydns.sucks
Similar to how it's getting harder these days to differentiate actual news from The Onion satires, reality takes on a somewhat surreal timbre when it starts to imitate your April Fool's gags from yesteryear… In 2011 we joked "easyDNS To Launch .SUX TLD", in which we posited a thinly veiled…
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Autonomous Weapons: An Open Letter from AI and Robotics Researchers
2016 (>30k signatures) open letter for AI and Robotics researchers calling for ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.
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ICANN's assault on personal and small business privacy
This post is extremely long and detailed and is on quite a dense subject. Here is the short version.
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Django Awarded MOSS Grant from Mozilla
Posted by Andrew Godwin on Dec. 11, 2015
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More than 39M Americans Only Have Access to One Wired Broadband Provider
Since 2010 the US government has spent $3.3B on broadband infrastructure yet 39 Million Americans only have access to 1 wired broadband provider. See the worst states and learn more about your state.
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Decertifying the worst voting machine in the US
On Apr 14 2015, the Virginia State Board of Elections immediately decertified use of the AVS WinVote touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine. This seems pretty minor, but it received a tremendous amount of pushback from some local election officials. In this post, I’ll explain how we got to that…
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Court: Breaking Your Employer's Computer Policy Isn't a Crime
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion rejecting the government’s attempt to hold an employee criminally liable under the federal hacking statute—the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”)—for violating his employer-imposed computer use restrictions. The decision...
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Go to Prison for File Sharing? That's What Hollywood Wants in the TPP Deal
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States' excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will...
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In Wake of Charlie Hebdo Attack, Let’s Not Sacrifice Even More Rights
EFF is stunned and deeply saddened by the attack on Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper. As free speech advocates, we mourn the use of violence against individuals who used creativity and free expression to engage in cultural and political criticism. Murder is the ultimate form of...
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Videogame Publishers: No Preserving Abandoned Games Because “Hacking” Is Illegal
The Entertainment Software Association doesn’t want anyone to restore the functionality of older videogames that are no longer supported by their publisher, because, says ESA, this is “hacking,” and all hacking is “associated with piracy.” EFF, along with law student Kendra Albert, is asking the...
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Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
It all started with a simple Twitter query from a Baltimore man: “Anyone know who has been flying the light plane in circles above the city for the last few nights?” This was several days after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, and the subsequent riots and protests. Pete Cimbolic, an aviation buff and…