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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
Looking for a research paper but can’t find a copy in your library’s catalog or popular search engines? Give Internet Archive Scholar a try! We might have a PDF from a “vanished” Open Access publisher in our web archive, an author’s pre-publication manuscript from their archived faculty webpage, or a digitized…
A statement jointly signed by a historic coalition of experts: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Record-high solar and wind bring the US to a clean power tipping point.
Anonymity technologies are becoming a legal requirement for public agency and corporate anti-corruption compliance.
Caltrain announced at its monthly Board of Directors meeting that regenerative braking on the new trains is generating and sending back to the electric grid approximately 23% of the energy consumed by the system.
We have observed some confusion about the Internet Archive’s removal of links to a BBC documentary about Indian PM Narendra Modi ("India: the Modi Question"). Internet Archive can confirm that it has removed links in response to DMCA takedown requests from the BBC.
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging a federal judge to dismiss Facebook's claims that criminal law is violated when its users opt for an add-on service that helps them aggregate their information from a variety of social networking sites. Power Ventures makes a web-...
*On August 10, 2017, we updated this post with additional National Security Letters (NSLs) we received where, either through litigation or legislation, we have been free…
At DuckDuckGo, our vision is to raise the standard of trust online. For the 7th year we're making donations to organizations that share a similar vision.
Last Tuesday we launched a National Emergency Library—1.4M digitized books available to users without a waitlist—in response to the rolling wave of school and library closures that remain in place to date. We’ve received dozens of messages of thanks from teachers and school librarians, who can now help their students…
On June 20th, board members of the „Zwiebelfreunde“ association in multiple German cities had their homes searched under the dubious pretence that they were „witnesses“ while their computers and...
Companies increasingly aim to control how users interact with their content online, threatening user freedom. As more companies crack down on browser exten...
This month we’ve ramped up the infrastructure behind the download server, and downloads should now be available earlier and faster. There’s also a small technical change in that requests for a “…latest” file will now be answered with a HTTP redirect to the specific latest version (see previous blog post).
FISA Reform §702 Is a Threat to Democracy At Home and Abroad.
The Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) recommended MrBeast update advertising and data collection practices.
In a major victory in one of EFF's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits, the Justice Department conceded yesterday that it will release hundreds of pages of documents, including FISA court opinions, related to the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law...
At FeeFighters, we’re constantly on conference calls with other companies. We’re a scrappy startup, so we use free services when we can. I’ve been using a free conference call line from freeeconferencecall.com for the past year, and wondering – how is it free? I chose freeconferencecall because they
These tiny insects kill more than 1,000,000 people every year
COVID-19 has pushed millions of people to work from home, and a flock of companies offering software for tracking workers has swooped in to pitch their products to employers across the country.The services often sound relatively innocuous. Some vendors bill their tools as “automatic time tracking”...
There is a new development that directly impacts the open source community, and it warrants a new commentary. Angry maintainers have started adding code to a small number of open source repositorie…
AP will no longer name suspects in minor crime stories, which we sometimes cover and pick up from member news organizations as one-off briefs because they are "odd" and of interest to our customers.
How online sales of highly regulated, super-toxic rodenticides exploit gaps in the law and imperil wildlife.
Sebastian Tomczak blogs about technology and sound, and has a YouTube channel. In 2015, Tomczak uploaded a ten-hour video of white noise. Colloquially, white noise is persistent background noise that can be soothing or that you don’t even notice after a while. More technically, white noise is many...
China yesterday blocked the Wikimedia Foundation’s application for observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations (UN) organization that develops international treaties on copyright, IP, trademarks, patents and related issues. As a result of the block, the Foundation’s…
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....
Today, 25% of adults ages 65 and older report never going online, compared with much smaller shares of adults under the age of 65.
