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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 268 posts.
A couple of weeks ago I visited my mother back home in Norway. She had gotten a new laptop some time ago that my brother-in-law had set up for her. As usual when I come for a visit I was asked to look at some technical issues my mother was experiencing with her computer. Anyway,...
Today the High Court of the United Kingdom handed down an excellent decision—excellent because the result is so unreasonable, so out of touch with reality, and so divorced from the needs and expectations of ordinary users, that it provides a textbook illustration of the need for urgent reform of...
Right before Congress left for its annual summer vacation the Obama Administration endorsed the Senate Intelligence Committee's Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). EFF opposes the bill because its vague definitions, broad legal immunity, and new spying powers allow for a tremendous amount...
Today the University of California expands the reach of its research publications by issuing a Presidential Open Access Policy, allowing future scholarly articles authored by all UC employees to be freely shared with readers worldwide. Building on UC’s previously-adopted Academic Senate open access (OA) policies, this…
There may be a scientific answer for why conservatives and liberals disagree so vehemently over the existence of issues like climate change and specific types of crime.A new study from Duke University finds that people will evaluate scientific evidence based on whether they view its policy implications as politically…
Yesterday, NYU Technology Law & Policy Clinic filed a legal brief on behalf of Freedom of the Press Foundation in Twitter's important lawsuit against the government for violating their First Amendment rights.Buoyed by the Snowden disclosures that began eighteen months ago, tech companies like Twitter have been…
As many of you have already seen, we are working on the next generation of the archive.org web site, which we call Version 2.0 (v2). It's in beta right now, so go check it out! We get a lot of feedback from the people who have elected to try out v2, and we read ALL of
Overall, non-US residents received 1,210 (54%) of the 2,244 computing related Ph.D. degrees awarded in the U.S. in 2013. This map illustrates that while non-U.S. residents received more than 50% of the Ph.D.s awarded in the majority of states, there was considerable variation across the states. Interestingly, a…
News, research, and insights from Stanford University.
How hundreds of thousands of Filipino soldiers fought in the U.S. military and helped win World War II. And how history -- and the American government -- forgot them.
MIRI's mission is "to ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact." How can we ensure any such thing? It's a
Employers illegally siphon billions of dollars out of low-wage workers' paychecks each year, but the vast majority of these crimes go unreported.
Californians can rest assured that law enforcement can’t poke around in their digital records without first obtaining a warrant. Today, Gov. Jerry Brown has signed S.B. 178, the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA). After months of pressure from public interest groups, media...
KAHNEMAN: Could you elaborate on these possibilities? I mean, what's the distinction between predicting and setting up a range of possibilities?
The history of the Witness Protection Program is full of Hollywood-worthy intrigue. It also challenges our assumptions about crime and identity.
As a UPS cargo load master, Bland Matthews has been tasked with shipping everything from Terracotta Army soldiers to beluga whales.
EFF defends rights in the digital world. But what about when the digital world enables violations of human rights? We think that’s important, too. That’s why we filed an amicus brief in In Re: South African Apartheid, a case that seeks to hold IBM's headquarters in New York responsible for...
In the public battle for strong encryption, EFF has championed the voice of everyday Internet users. After all, if we can’t rely on the security of our digital communications, how can the Web continue to grow and thrive? Now the fight has moved to the Oval Office. EFF, Access Now, over a dozen...
We were disappointed today to learn that a federal appeals court in Pasadena declined to consider EFF’s appeal of a ruling in Jewel v. NSA, our long-running lawsuit battling unconstitutional mass surveillance of Internet and phone communications. While we are disappointed that government’s stall...
We are happy to announce that the court of Munich has ruled in favor of the Wikimedia Foundation in Dr. Evelyn Schels v. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc..
Since late 2004, EFF has been warning the public about "printer dots" -- tiny yellow dots that appear on documents produced by many color laser printers and copiers. These yellow dots form a coded pattern on every page the printer produces and can be used to identify specific details about a...
Windows 10 has been a great journey so far. Following the plan we originally outlined in June, more than 110M devices have upgraded. If you’re already running Windows 10 – thank you! Our aspiration is for customers to choose Windows, and to love Windows. Our early data shows customers from France to Brazil to China
