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How to Be a Lawyer Without Going to Law School
A handful of lawyers practice law in the United States without a law degree, bypassing three years of hell (and thousands of dollars in college debt). Here's how.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 268 posts.
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Victory for CloudFlare Against SOPA-like Court Order
Striking a blow against the continuing effort to force service providers to serve as IP police, CloudFlare and EFF have pushed back against a court order that would have required CloudFlare to monitor its service to enforce a trademark held by a group of music labels. Last week, Judge Alison J....
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An unexpected benefit of open-sourcing our code
Recently I was contacted by Dr. Igor Kozin from The Institute of Cancer Research in London. He asked about the optimal way to compile CloudFlare's open source fork of zlib.
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British Spy Agency Considers Journalists a Threat, Vacuums Up Their Emails
Terrorists, hackers, and journalists. According to a recent Guardian article covering new Snowden documents, British spy agency GCHQ considers all of these individuals threats—various levels of threats, but threats nonetheless. One intelligence report goes so far as to say, "Of specific concern are...
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Surveillance forces journalists to think and act like spies
Once upon a time, a journalist never gave up a confidential source. When someone comes forward, anonymously, to inform the public, it's better to risk time incarcerated than give them up. This ethical responsibility was also a practical and professional necessity. If you promise anonymity, you're obliged to deliver…
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Why We Should Demand a Shorter Workweek
I.W.W. Poster By Dustin Guastella If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist. – K. Marx Recently a Chicago firm made headlines when it was revealed that they allowed their workers less than six minutes a day in the bathroom. Naturally, people were outraged, but this is an old…
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Flickr now offers Public Domain and CC0 designations
Starting today, Flickr is happy to support Public Domain and Creative Commons 0 (CC0) works on our site.
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Out of the Darkness: How two psychologists and CIA devised torture program
How two psychologists teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings.
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Human Rights Watch Sues DEA Over Bulk Collection of Americans’ Telephone Records
Los Angeles — Human Rights Watch, a nonpartisan organization that fights human rights abuses across the globe, filed suit against the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration late Tuesday for illegally collecting records of its telephone calls to certain foreign countries as part of yet another...
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Canada's Quiet Weakening of Communications Encryption
This article outlines some of the federal government of Canada’s successful and unsuccessful attempts to weaken encryption standards.
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The New USA Freedom Act: A Step in the Right Direction, but More Must Be Done
A bipartisan group of congressional leaders has reintroduced the USA Freedom Act. The bill is an attempt to rein in the intelligence community's "Collect It All" strategy, and passing USA Freedom is a first, small step in the right direction. However, it has serious faults that should be addressed...
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EFF to UN: You Need a Privacy Watchdog
EFF joined more than sixty civil liberties organizations and public interest groups from across the world yesterday in calling upon the world's governments to support the creation of a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy. The special rapporteurs are independent experts...
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DARE: The Anti-Drug Program That Never Actually Worked
Studies showed early on that kids who went through DARE weren't any less likely to do drugs. Why did schools keep using it?
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Congress Is Poised to Introduce a Bill to Fast Track TPP So It's Time to Act Now
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks are stalling while the White House assures its trading partners that this secret trade agreement won't be amended when it comes back to Congress for ratification after the President signs the deal. That's why the Executive is scrambling to get its allies in...
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Norway to switch off FM in 2017
The Ministry of Culture has announced a national FM-switch off, to complete the transition to digital radio. Norway is making...
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The Invention of the Baby Carrot
Baby carrots are just regular carrots cut up and polished down. They're also the biggest thing to happen to carrots since orange. How did it happen?
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Buenos Aires Censors and Raids the Technologists Fixing Its E-Voting System
Buenos Aires is currently in the middle of electing its mayor and city council. With a first round that took place on July 5th, and a second round due on July 19th, the election is the first time Argentina's capital city has used an electronic voting system called Vot.ar, created by local company...
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Nothing Is Agreed Yet – We Can Still Stop the TPP's Copyright Trap
Trade negotiators have a saying—that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. What that means is that despite all of the deals that has been struck in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations so far, they remain tentative until each country signs off on the final agreement. A...
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The Collapse of the US-EU Safe Harbor
When people who care about technology look back at the year 2015, they will remember October as the month when the EU-U.S. Safe Harbor collapsed. An international legal agreement that has been in place for 15 years was invalidated in a single day. On Oct. 6, the Court of Justice of the European Union struck...
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FBI Returns Seized Devices to EFF Client
EFF is pleased to announce that our client, Chris Roberts, is now in the possession of all of his digital devices that had been held by the FBI since April 2015. Earlier this year, Mr. Roberts was detained for tweeting about airplane network security. When he landed in Syracuse, the FBI escorted...
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Hacker News as a case study to test the wisdom of the crowd theory
Marketing Plan: What It Is & How to Create One (With Examples)
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A Few Global Cultural Treasures We Will Lose for 20 Years Under the TPP
What do Japan's Blue Sky Library, Malaysia's answer to John Wayne, and the first recorded composer from New Zealand, all have in common? They could all disappear from their countries' public domain for the next 20 years, if the current agreement on copyright term extension in the Trans-Pacific...
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TPP Threatens Security and Safety by Locking Down US Policy on Source Code Audit
Multiple recent reports on serious security vulnerabilities in cable modems and routers paint a dire picture of the state of security of the devices that millions of users depend upon to connect to the Internet. Such vulnerabilities can be exploited to disable our access, snoop on our personal...
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