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The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
A personal perspective on the complex role English plays in Japan.
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 244 posts.
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Self-control signals and affords power
New research from the UC San Diego Rady School of Management and Texas A&M University finds that having self-control is often what leads to power.
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Controversial pesticide research all but vanished from a major conference
During hundreds of sessions, a significant topic went missing: scholarly research on one of Corteva’s products – neonicotinoids.
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Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem
With the rise of 'okupación' in Spain, property owners and individuals alike are seeking to navigate the legal landscape and social implications of squatting.
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We have surpassed 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries that sustain human life (2023)
The planetary boundaries framework highlights the rising risks from human pressure on nine critical global processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth
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Microsoft's Xandr grants GDPR rights at a rate of 0%
noyb has filed a GDPR complaint regarding transparency issues, the right of access and the use of inaccurate information about users
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Let Readers Read
Ask publishers to restore access to the 500,000 books they've caused to be removed from the Internet Archive’s lending library. Sign the Open Letter I’m Chris Freeland, a librarian at the Internet Archive. The lawsuit against our library—Hachette v. Internet Archive—is fast approaching the oral argument stage of its…
128
The European regulators listened to the Open Source communities
Open Source communities defended developers and foundations against risks posed by the CRA to Open Source development, and their voices were heard. Workshops being offered at FOSDEM offer a chance …
129
Influencer cartels manipulate social media
Social media influencers account for a growing share of marketing budgets worldwide. This column examines a problem within this rapidly expanding advertising market – influencer cartels, in which groups of influencers collude to increase advertising revenue by inflating each other’s engagement numbers. Influencer…
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Browsing negative content online makes mental health struggles worse: Study
People struggling with their mental health are more likely to browse negative content online, and in turn, that negative content makes their symptoms worse, according to a series of studies by researchers at MIT.
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DEA Accepts Health Agency's Recommendation to Reclassify Cannabis
Determination must be reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget
133
EFF to Ninth Circuit: No Software Exception to Traditional Copyright Limits
Copyright’s reach is already far too broad, and courts have no business expanding it any further, particularly where that reframing will undermine adversarial interoperability. Unfortunately, a federal district court did just that in the latest iteration of Oracle v. Rimini, concluding that...
134
85% of People Want Global Ban on Single-Use Plastics
An Ipsos poll finds overwhelming global support for banning harmful plastics and chemicals, with 87% backing reduced plastic production worldwide.
135
The epidemic of fraudulent DMCA takedowns
There’s an enormous and largely invisible campaign to use fraudulent notices under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove critical articles from the internet. We don’t know who is running…
136
Anti-municipal broadband budget amendment gets nixed in New York
Advocates for better Internet access are breathing a sigh of relief in New York as the State Assembly nixed a budget bill amendment that would have undermined the state’s municipal broadband grant program.
137
What Happens When a Fifteen Year Old Pumps and Dumps with a Net Profit of $800k? (2002)
Ranked among the best in the U.S., Illinois Tech empowers students with hands-on learning, diverse programs, and a high career-placement rate. Elevate your
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X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
X (fka Twitter) has quietly redesigned its 🔫 Water Pistol emoji to display as a firearm. This diverges from the cross-platform conversion of this emoji from firearm to water pistol from 2016 to 2018.
140
Bossware is a big legal risk
Monitoring employees in the name of productivity or security can cause a lot more problems than it solves.
141
David Holladay, blindness technology pioneer, has died
This week brings sad news for our Duxbury Systems family. Our colleague, David Holladay, passed away in a hospital on Thursday, February 15th, following an accident at home that morning. David was a cancer survivor and valiantly battled multiple medical problems over his last five years.
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Right to Repair: The Price Is Not Right
This article exposes the unfair reality of spare part prices. To make repair affordable, we need reasonable prices for original parts, clear acceptance for the use of compatible parts (third party, used or 3D-printed) and a solid ban on parts pairing.
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How do archivists package things? The battle of the boxes
It’s been a while since we posted one of our articles pulling back the curtains on archival work. To make up for that, here’s a special edition of our popular Archives FAQs and Facts series. For th…
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Proposed UN cybercrime treaty has evolved into an expansive surveillance tool
EFF has joined forces with 110 NGOs today in a joint statement delivered to the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee, clearly outlining civil society non-negotiable redlines for the proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty, and asserting that states should reject the proposed treaty if these essential changes are...
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New standards for a faster and more private Internet
Cloudflare's customers can now take advantage of Zstandard (zstd) compression, offering 42% faster compression than Brotli and 11.3% more efficiency than GZIP. We're further optimizing performance for our customers with HTTP/3 prioritization and BBR congestion control, and enhancing privacy through Encrypted Client…
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Making the web fun again (2013)
Ever since I visited my first web site (via a slow modem to a library BBS running a text-based web browser), I have been ceaselessly pondering the nature of ...
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Don't fall for the latest changes to the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act
The authors of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) unveiled an amended version this week, but it’s still an unconstitutional censorship bill that continues to empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like.
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I bought an encyclopedia
NOTE: This is a companion post to my piece in Public Books, "The Encylopedia Project: Or, how to know in…
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Golden Gate Claude
When we amplify the "Golden Gate Bridge" feature, Claude's responses focus on the bridge. For a short time, anyone can interact with this model.