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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 304 posts.
This report summarizes the results of our review of the GEMS election management system, which counts approximately 25 percent of all votes in the United States. The results of this study demonstrate that a fractional vote feature is embedded in each GEMS application which can be used to invisibly, yet radically…
The Internet lit up on Monday over the news, reported in New York Magazine , that a team of computer scientists and lawyers had reported to the Clinton campaign that “they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. ”
I've been sitting here this morning paralyzed at what to say in response to this... The last few months since we launched That Dragon, Cancer have been pretty incredible. The mainstream culture, the gamer culture, and others have all embraced our story and been willing to listen to our heart a
Finnish EDRi member Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi) is gravely concerned over a draft law on Internet surveillance. The bill that the country’s current government is in the process of preparing will grant the military and the Finnish Security Intelligence Service (Supo) the authority to conduct electronic mass…
This article was originally published by War is Boring on 31 October 2016.On Sept. 10, 2016, the U.S.-brokered a ceasefire with Russia and Syria in the besieged city of Aleppo. Although low-in
In 2011, Ahmed Salah was a leading Egyptian revolutionary who met with ambassadors and Secretaries of State. Now he is nearly homeless in San Francisco.
Which English Wikipedia articles were edited most in 2016? Find out what captured editors’ interests.
Automation and offshoring are playing significant roles in the types of jobs that are growing or stagnating.
In his 2004 book Perilous Times , Geoffrey R. Stone observes that with respect to free speech rights in wartime, “Time and again, Americans have suppressed dissent, imprisoned and deported dissenters, and then—later—regretted their actions.” In reality, as the timeline below demonstrates, it is not simply American’s…
The U.S. White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is considering a new policy for sharing source code for software created by or for government projects. There’s a lot to love about the proposed policy: it would make it easier for people to find and reuse government software, and...
Attorneys for the Oracle and Google companies presented opening statements this week in a high-stakes copyright case about the use of application-programming interfaces, or APIs. As Oracle eagerly noted, there are potentially billions of dollars on the line; accordingly, each side has brought “...
The FBI's demand that Apple craft new software to bypass iOS's security protections has ignited a worldwide debate about a government's ability to force tech companies to sabotage their own security. One repeated question has been: will other countries, like China, demand the same powers? You don't...
The House Judiciary Committee has plans for a “members only” meeting next week to discuss Section 702 of the FISA Amendment Acts, the law the NSA relies on to operate its notorious PRISM surveillance program and to tap into the backbone of the Internet, also known as “upstream” collection. While we...
Over the past several days, a number of people have made serious, public allegations of sexual...
Insights for leaders building AI systems by Andela
The right to be forgotten can sometimes seem complex, and discussions about jurisdiction online certainly are complicated. But should the balance between the right to fr…
Inequality in the United States, which began its most recent rise in the late 1970s, continues to surge in the...
The organizations willing to spend $20,000-$200,000 to hear a luminary speak include Wall Street banks, summer camp executives, and national associations of bakers.
Xinjiang, home of the China's muslim Uighur minority, has long been the world's laboratory for Internet repression. Faced with widespread local unrest, and online debate, China has done everything it can to enforce its vision of the Net in the region, from imprisoning bloggers and online publishers...
New EFF Report Maps Legal Threats to Free Expression in the Arab WorldFreedom of expression is a universal right, but the specific threats to it vary widely from country to country and region to region. As activists fighting for free speech worldwide, it is essential that we better understand the...
Ayudamos a la comunidad a través de actividades cívicas constructivas.
I have a new draft paper with Aylin Caliskan-Islam and Joanna Bryson titled Semantics derived automatically from language corpora necessarily contain human biases. We show empirically that natural language necessarily contains human biases, and the paradigm of training machine learning on language corpora means that…
While there are countless examples of DMCA abuse, sometimes a story stands out. Last week, Samsung sent a series of takedown notices aimed at videos showing a GTA V mod in action. The modification replaced an in-game weapon with an exploding Samsung phone. Whether you think these videos are...
Until just last week, the U.S. government kept up the charade that its use of a stockpile of security vulnerabilities for hacking was a closely held secret.[fn]For what it's worth, the government denies having a “Raiders of the Lost Ark style” stockpile of zero days.[/fn] In fact, in response to...
The Nobel Peace Prize 2016 was awarded to Juan Manuel Santos "for his resolute efforts to bring the country's more than 50-year-long civil war to an end"
