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Oregon Just Voted to Legalize Duplexes on Almost Every City Lot
House Bill 2001 will strike down local bans on duplexes for every low-density residential lot in all cities with more than 10,000 residents and...
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 352 posts.
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Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram Restricted in Southern Turkey
Network data from the NetBlocks internet observatory confirm that Turkey has blocked access to social media and messaging platforms in the southern cities of Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa and Hatay, as the ...
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Privacy: Is That iPhone?
A new Mozilla-Ipsos poll reveals that a majority of iPhone users treasure privacy — but aren’t aware of the device's ad tracking
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Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not
The world needs ideas and innovation to make progress. Creative and talented people are everywhere, but the opportunity to develop is limited to only a small number of well-off children. The world loses out as a result.
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Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Down to Users and Misses the Point
Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today (paywalled, but summarized here) relies on all-too-familiar refrains to explain the dubious principles and so-called “facts” behind Facebook’s business model. It’s the same old song we’ve heard before. And, as usual, it wildly misses users’...
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CNIL imposes a financial penalty of 50M euros against Google
This page is no longer available. Order to comply or sanctions issued by the CNIL may be made public. In this case, a time limit shall be specified in the decision. Once this time period has expired, the organisations that have been given formal notice or sanctioned are no longer identified in the public decision. For…
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The Mueller Report Can’t Be Copyrighted, Is Flagged by Copyright Bots Anyway
Did you know that anything created by federal government employees, under American law, can’t be copyrighted? They go right into the public domain. That means it’s impossible for there to be any copyright infringement on, say, a report by the Special Counsel on the investigation into the President...
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How Apps on Android Share Data with Facebook (2018)
Facebook routinely tracks users, non-users and logged-out users outside its platform through Facebook Business Tools. App developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of software development tools that help developers build apps for a specific operating system. Using…
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EU’s Parliament Signs Off on Disastrous Internet Law: What Happens Next?
In a stunning rejection of the will of five million online petitioners, and over 100,000 protestors this weekend, the European Parliament has abandoned common-sense and the advice of academics, technologists, and UN human rights experts, and approved the Copyright in the Digital Single Market...
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It's time to switch to a four-day working week, say two experts
Working less would have a range of benefits for workers and employers and the world should embrace the four day working week, was the message two experts brought to Davos 2019.
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EFF’s Tweet About a DMCA Takedown Is Now Subject to an Overzealous Takedown
Get ready for a tale as good as anything you’d see on television. Here’s the sequence of events: the website TorrentFreak publishes an article about a leak of TV episodes, including shows from the network Starz. TorrentFreak tweets its article, Starz sends a copyright takedown notice. TorrentFreak writes about the…
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President Signs Government-Wide Open Data Bill
The Data Coalition is dedicated to improving government, business, and society through open data and evidence-informed public policy
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Trolls Are Real
In most issues of EFFector, we give an overview of all the work we’re doing at EFF. Today, in light of recent developments at the U.S. Patent Office, we’re doing a deep dive into a single issue: recent changes to the patent system, and how it’s in danger of heading backwards.
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The importance of decentralisation
Affordable VM hosting in Glarus, Switzerland, operated by 100% hydropower. Devuan, debian, freebsd, ubuntu, centos. Our tech stack is fully open source.
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Researchers find trapdoor in SwissVote election system
A team of researchers have examined the source code published as part of the SwissPost e-voting system, provided by Scytl, and discovered a cryptographic trapdoor.
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Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
Gideon Lewis-Kraus ( Jan. 17 ) profiles the nascent field of ancient DNA, which in the last few years has contributed to a transformation in our understanding of the deep human past. His article touches on important issues that we, as a field, have yet to deal with fully: including how to handle ancient remains…
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What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
The UC Negotiating Team Ivy Anderson, (Co-Chair), Associate Executive Director of the California Digital Library; Jeffrey MacKie-Mason (Co-Chair), University Librarian and Professor, School of Information and Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley; Günter Waibel, Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director of the…
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My Product Is Unexpectedly Being Used to Help People with Dementia
One of the more heartwarming moments of my journey building NanaGram was totally unexpected. A few months after launching, I built a way for customers to post reviews. These automatically get posted to the home page. Within a couple weeks, two customers sent reviews mentioning how their loved one has dementia and…
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Eliminating Robocalls
Twilio's CEO talks about trusted communications, reputation, robocalling, and making it safe to pick up your phone again.
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Media Can’t Stop Presenting Horrifying Stories as ‘Uplifting’ Perseverance Porn
In the popular trend of unintentionally horrifying “uplifting” news, out-of-touch corporate media give us supposedly charming, wholesome and positive news that actually, upon even minimal retrospection, reveals the dire conditions of late capitalism so many Americans now live under, and makes you feel worse after…
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NYC Mesh Begins Broadband Expansion in Brooklyn
Building a community-owned and -operated internet network for all New Yorkers
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Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive
Update, 25 March: The Italian, Galician, Asturian, and Catalan Wikipedias have blacked themselves out today to protest the EU Copyright Directive. Other language versions of Wikipedia have chosen to show site banners above their content. Wikipedia’s volunteer editing communities make decisions like this independently…
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