Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
DAWO.community, working together on a digitally autonomous workplace for the Dutch government.
A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy
Cambridge University Press is publishing a textbook I have co-edited with five colleagues, Shaken Baby Syndrome, Investigating the Abusive Head Trauma Controversy, by Findley et al. With contributions by 32 authors, this book provides a thorough analysis of an interdisciplinary subject lying at the intersection of…
Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
The Online Information Environment report discusses how to limit the harm of scientific misinformation online
School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study
Psychologists at the University of York, who tested the impact that smartphones have on children’s behaviour for a new two-part documentary series for Channel 4, found that a ban in school impacted positively on sleep and mood.
Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map
Learn how to view areas of GPS jamming affecting aircraft around the world and how GPS jamming affects aviation.
Blocking Kiwifarms
We have blocked Kiwifarms. Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post.
DisneyMustPay Alan Dean Foster
Alan Dean Foster and SFWA President Mary Robinette Kowal discuss the non-payment by Disney of several contracts for works including multiple Star Wars and Aliens novelizations.
Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
Wow.I flagged on Wednesday that Chief Judge Connolly planned to hold an evidentiary hearing today regarding compliance with his litigation …
FCC votes to limit prison telecom charges
Federal Communications Commission unanimously votes to significantly reduce prison communication costs.
Let us serve you, but don't bring us down
What just happened on archive.org today, as best we know: Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon's AWS services. (Even by web standards,10’s of thousands of requests per second is a lot.) This activity brought archive.org down for all…
A small restaurant owner on Google, DoorDash, and Grubhub
DoorDash & GrubHub charge restaurants an advertising fee and then use that money to pay Google to run advertisements that use our restaurant’s brand name to divert customers away from our website to our competitors on their platform. My name is Travis Stoliker and I’m a small restaurant owner in Lansing Michigan. O
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
With its legislative proposal known as “Chat Control,” the EU Commission is trying to establish an unprecedented mass-surveillance apparatus of Orwellian proportions in the European Union. If EU citizens don’t stand up for privacy now, it may be too late.
Virginia bans sale of precise geolocation data
On April 13, 2026, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed into law S.B. 338 , which amends the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (“VCDPA”) to prohibit the sale of geolocation data. Notably, the VCDPA defines “sale” more narrowly than other state comprehensive privacy laws, as “the exchange of personal data…
Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossibl
New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking
Today, the Norwegian Consumer Council has filed a complaint against Google. Based on new research Google is accused of using deceptive design and misleading information, which results in users accepting to be constantly tracked
‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies
Censored Planet by salvey on Sketchfab The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of the world’s freest countries are not safe from internet censorship. A University of Michigan team used Censored Planet, an automated censorship tracking syste
NSO Group iMessage Zero-Click Exploit Captured in the Wild
While analyzing the phone of a Saudi activist infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, we discovered a zero-day zero-click exploit against iMessage. The exploit, which we call FORCEDENTRY, targets Apple’s image rendering library, and was effective against Apple iOS, MacOS and WatchOS devices.
GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers
GPTZero's analysis 4841 papers accepted by NeurIPS 2025 show there are at least 100 with confirmed hallucinations
Net neutrality is in jeopardy again
Net neutrality is in jeopardy again. We need another grassroots movement By Ashley Boyd, VP Advocacy A little over two years ago, the mood here at Mozil
French govt. says users of uBlock Origin, Signal etc. are potential terrorists
This article was written on the basis of information related to the so-called "8 December" case (see the footnotes for a global overview of the case, we focus on the "numerical part" of it in this article<fn>For a summary of the 8 December affair see in particular the testimonies available in thi
Reddit to go dark on Jan 18 to protest SOPA
Get the latest product news, company announcements, and user insights from the official Reddit blog.
Adblocking: How about Nah?
For more than a decade, consumer rights groups (including EFF) worked with technologists and companies to try to standardize Do Not Track, a flag that browsers could send to online companies signaling that their users did not want their browsing activity tracked. Despite long hours and backing from...