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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
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FISA "reform" bill would greatly expand the entities forced to surveil users
Yesterday the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence unanimously approved the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2023 (FRRA), which would reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA 702). The full House is expected to vote on this bill next Tuesday. Like other competing…
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After millennia of expansion, the world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’
The world produces more food than ever, but the amount of land we use is now falling. This means we can feed more people while restoring wild habitat.
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An Open Letter to the Python Software Foundation
Dear PSF, We, organisers in the pan-African Python community, would like to raise some concerns and frustrations that have been brought to a...
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Metformin shown to prevent long Covid
A 14-day course of metformin, a common drug used to manage type 2 diabetes, prevents long COVID, according to a new study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases .
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Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable
Before the 1970s, most children affected by leukemia would quickly die from it. Now, most children in rich countries are cured.
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How do you fix a stroad?
We respond to a question posted for us on Reddit about a stroad that seems unfixable—and maybe that’s because it is.
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Mobifree – An open-source mobile ecosystem
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to engage in a mobile ecosystem outside of the watchful eye of the Big Tech giants and gatekeepers? A system tha...
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Making the Tibetan language a first-class citizen in the digital world
Read about a major milestone in technological innovation of the Tibetan language as the open source software suite LibreOffice's latest update supports an important feature of Tibetan: very long paragraphs.
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CERN Ends Trial of Facebook Workplace
This content is currently in the process of being archived and integrated into the CERN Library collections.
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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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MAPS Celebrates California Senate Passage of Psychedelic Reform Bill
Fifty years after the War on Drugs was officially declared and psychedelic substance prohibition began in contravention of evidence supporting therapeutic use, the California State Senate has taken the first Legislative step to dismantle psychedelic prohibition with a 21-16 vote on June 1, 2021, in favor of Senate…
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Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people
About half the public identify the cost of groceries as a major source of financial stress. Nearly 1 in 5 of them have used so-called Buy Now Play Later services to buy their groceries.
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Slop is not necessarily the future
Everyone's worried about slop, but good code will prevail, not only because we want it to, but because economic forces demand it.
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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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How AI destroys institutions
Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life. They are the mechanisms through which complex societies encourage cooperation and stability, while also adapting to changing circumstances. The real superpower of institutions is their ability to evolve and adapt…
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I asked an online tracking company for all of my data (2018)
It’s 15:10 pm on April 18, 2018. I’m in the Privacy International office, reading a news story on the use of facial recognition in Thailand. On April 20, at 21:10, I clicked on a CNN Money Exclusive on my phone.
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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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German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
The comapny uses manipulative designs to prevent people from obtaining a free copy of their data in accordance with law
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Austria's data protection authority has found that Google Analytics is illegal
Using Google Analytics in a legally compliant way is still possible in Europe. Here we explain how.
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Aaron Swartz v. United States
(echoes of a broken system) UPDATE: Aaron committed suicide on January 11, 2013.(!) More on his life here. Aaron Swartz is a friend and Cambridge-area polymath whose projects focus on access to kno…
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Don't Terminate People's Internet Connections
Here is a plea to keep Internet services on in these times where we rely on online communications.