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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 295 posts.
Research based at Princeton University found that poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life.
Ahead of the crucial EU copyright vote on 12 Sept., we set the facts straight and explain exactly what the new rules will mean for the internet in Europe.
Mozilla is pressing pause on our Facebook advertising. Facebook knows a great deal about their two billion users — perhaps more intimate information than
All this month, the European Union's "trilogue" is meeting behind closed doors to hammer out the final wording of the new Copyright Directive, a once-noncontroversial regulation that became a hotly contested matter when, at the last minute, a set of extremist copyright proposals were added and...
When the FBI Shows Up at Your Office with an NSL When you receive thousands of requests from law enforcement each year, it’s actually not a surprise wh
Eight years after Google initially took a stand against Internet censorship by exiting the Chinese search market, we are disappointed to learn the company has been secretly re-considering an extended collaboration with the massive censorship and surveillance-wielding state. According to an...
Over the last few years the European Union has been working on revising its rules on copyright. But the latest proposal from the head of the copyright committee would deny creators the right to refuse remuneration — the right to share a work without getting paid — which could undermine the use of CC licenses…
The Transportation Security Administration has set out an alarming vision of pervasive biometric surveillance at airports, which cuts against the right to privacy, the “right to travel,” and the right to anonymous association with others.The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, which included language...
This blog post is a personal account of sexism, harassment, and racism that I and some anonymous members of the computer architecture community have experienced. We are sharing these experiences in…
If your growth strategy only works as long as wealthy people live in your town, your growth strategy is deeply fragile.
Australia recently passed a law that correctly has people asking about the security and privacy of tools like 1Password.
UPDATE, March 23, 2018: President Donald Trump signed the $1.3 trillion government spending bill—which includes the CLOUD Act—into law Friday morning. “People deserve the right to a better process.”Those are the words of Jim McGovern, representative for Massachusetts and member of the House of...
Most cities’ zoning and development regulations obsess over things that are easy to measure, like building height and density, at the expense of the things that actually determine whether we’re building quality places.
Just over half of Facebook users have adjusted privacy settings in the past year. Around four-in-ten have taken a break from checking for several weeks or more.
The previous limit was almost 10 hours every single day, including weekends.
The pending update to the EU Copyright Directive is coming up for a committee vote on June 20 or 21 and a parliamentary vote either in early July or late September. While the directive fixes some longstanding problems with EU rules, it creates much, much larger ones: problems so big that they...
The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) last week released a new report that supports what EFF has long suspected: that the FBI’s legal fight with Apple in 2016 to create backdoor access to a San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone was more focused on creating legal precedent than...
[Update: Ironically, after ascending rapidly and fostering vigorous commentary over on Hackernews, this article has been "flagged" there . Update #2: A few hours later it was unflagged and is currently on the first page of HN ] The phenomenon of deplatforming in the internet age, which includes the component of…
We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make...
Wage theft—employers’ failure to pay workers money they are legally entitled to—affects far more people than more well-known and feared forms of theft such as bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies. Employers steal billions of dollars from their employees…
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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On Saturday evening, I was disturbed to discover that our OpenBenches Twitter Account had been suspended! To be clear, OpenBenches posts photos of benches. That’s it. No porn, no spam, no enc…
The RescueTime for iOS app has been temporarily removed from the App Store. This is obviously incredibly disappointing for us and all our users.
