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Slow Software
What it means for software to be fast, and why most software is not.
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
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VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
The FSFE and LUGBZ have recognized VLC president and core developer with this European award for his long-term dedication to the project. What began as a s...
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Sony Finally Admits It Doesn’t Own Bach
Here’s the thing about different people playing the same piece of music: sometimes, they’re going to sound similar. And when music is by a composer who died 268 years ago, putting his music in the public domain, a bunch of people might record it and some of them might put it online. In this...
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US Sought Permission to Change Historical Record of a Public Court Proceeding
A few weeks ago we fought a battle for transparency in our flagship NSA spying case, Jewel v. NSA. But, ironically, we weren't able to tell you anything about it until now. On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on...
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The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption
Federal law enforcement has been asking for a backdoor to read Americans’ encrypted communications for years now. FBI Director Christopher Wray did it again last week in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. As usual, the FBI’s complaints involved end-to-end encryption employed by popular...
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Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue
Search was 49.7% of Alphabet's revenue in Q3 2026, down from 62% in early 2019, as Google Cloud grew much faster. Every quarter since 2018, from Alphabet's earnings releases.
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WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
Imagine your performance at work was assessed directly from the amount of e-mails sent, the amount of time consumed editing a document, or the time spent in meetings or even moving your mouse. This may sound ludicrous but your boss might be doing exactly that.
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Tell NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to keep Wayback Machine
The news isn’t getting preserved in the Wayback Machine anymore because major media outlets are blocking it.
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How Syria Turned Off the Internet
Today, 29 November 2012, between 1026 and 1028 (UTC), all traffic from Syria to the rest of the Internet stopped. At CloudFlare, we witnessed the drop off. We've spent the morning studying the situation to understand what happened.
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US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
Only the Netherlands has a higher average compulsory payment wedge than the US.
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The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State
Thanks in part to your support, the right to repair is now law in Washington.Gov. Bob Ferguson signed two bills guaranteeing Washingtonians' right to access tools, parts, and information so they can fix personal electronics, appliances, and wheelchairs. This is the epitome of common-sense...
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SCOTUS rules you may sue government agents for damages when they violate rights
Arlington, Va.—In a unanimous opinion issued today by the U.S. Supreme Court, and authored by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court ruled in Tanzin v. […]
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Sony Pirates KDE Artwork
Sony, the company who created Audio CDs which installed a rootkit on Windows computer to try to stop people copying music has pirated KDE artwork. The preferences-system.png icon from Oxygen is on their Choose your Vaio webpages (next to configure) but impressively is also on the UEFI firmware should you boot up into…
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Apple does right by users and advertisers are displeased
With the new Safari 11 update, Apple takes an important step to protect your privacy, specifically how your browsing habits are tracked and shared with parties other than the sites you visit. In response, Apple is getting criticized by the advertising industry for "destroying the Internet's...
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The FCC needs to stop 5G fast lanes
The FCC is set to vote on April 25 to restore its authority over the companies we pay to get online, and reinstate federal net neutrality protections that were jettisoned by the Trump administration in 2017. Net neutrality protections are supposed to ensure that we, not the internet service providers
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The Belgian government has removed ‘backdoor requirement’ from new law
The Belgian government has removed 'backdoor requirement' from new law after international protest.
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Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting
When someone goes to the lengths of making counterfeits of your products, it's at least a sign you're doing something right. And it deserves a minute of flattery. But when Chinese counterfeiters tool up and make copies of your product, send that inventory to Amazon, then overtake the real product's buy box by auto-lo
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Today, Europe Lost The Internet. Now, We Fight Back
Today, in a vote that split almost every major EU party, Members of the European Parliament adopted every terrible proposal in the new Copyright Directive and rejected every good one, setting the stage for mass, automated surveillance and arbitrary censorship of the internet: text messages like...
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China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia
translation: 中国封锁了所有语言版本的维基百科 China recently started blocking all language editions of Wikipedia. Previously, the blocking was limited to the Chinese language edition of Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org), but has now expanded to include all *.wikipedia.org language editions. In this post, we share OONI network measurement…
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Telling the Truth About Defects in Technology Should Never Be Illegal
Congress has never made a law saying, "Corporations should get to decide who gets to publish truthful information about defects in their products,"— and the First Amendment wouldn't allow such a law — but that hasn't stopped corporations from conjuring one out of thin air, and then defending it as...
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No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation
GENEVA (20 January 2022) – In a new policy brief, the World Heart Federation (WHF) challenges the widespread notion that drinking moderate amounts of alcohol can decrease the risk of heart disease, and calls for urgent and decisive action to tackle the unprecedented rise in alcohol-related death and disability…
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Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments
We can make low risk, high returning investments in our cities while improving the quality of life for people, particularly those who are not benefiting from the current approach.
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Things to know about the GDPR, Mozilla and Firefox
Has your email inbox been filling up with privacy policy updates? It seems like every service, app or subscription I’ve signed up for (including more tha
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Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
This post is the first in series on the militarization of policing. Check back this week from more from Radley Balko .
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UK Authorities Destroy Guardian's Hard Drives
Fresh off the news that UK authorities detained the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald for nine hours yesterday, Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger has published an extraordinary report of government pressure and intimidation that should send chills down the spine of anyone who cares about a free…
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