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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 352 posts.
We’re releasing the 774 million parameter GPT-2 language model after the release of our small 124M model in February, staged release of our medium 355M model in May, and subsequent research with partners and the AI community into the model’s potential for misuse and societal benefit. We’re also releasing an…
Third-party Facebook apps gather Facebook data about the people who use them. While Facebook struggles to contain these exposures, insecure third-party data practices & misconfigured cloud systems continue to leak Facebook data to the internet. See how UpGuard discovered and secured two such cases.
When we publicly demanded that Facebook stop messing with users’ phone numbers last week, we weren’t expecting the social network to double down quite like this: By default, anyone can use the phone number that a user provides for two-factor authentication (2FA) to find that user’s profile. For...
Last week, the American public finally got its hands on the Mueller report–more than 400 pages, much of the text redacted, detailing the special counsel’s much anticipated findings. Within minutes of that release, many copies of that file were uploaded to the Internet Archive. On Amazon, other outfits were charging…
Fourteen years to the day after she discovered she was on the no-fly list when she was arrested at SFO, and five years after her legal victory in the first trial of a challenge to a government no-fly order (a Pyrrhic victory as she has still been denied a visa to return to the US), Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim won a third…
Network data from the NetBlocks internet observatory confirm that Iraq has introduced a nighttime internet curfew, consistent with reports from IT industry workers in recent days. Confirmed: #Iraq has partly ...
At GitHub, we believe in empowering developers around the world. We also believe in basic human rights and treating people with respect and dignity. Today, I wanted to share a message I sent to all employees yesterday that is related to this, as it is important that we share our views on immigration policy with the…
For nearly a decade, we’ve been in discussions with the European Commission about the way some of our products work. Throughout this process, we’ve always agreed on one …
You can now donate to support Signal, the secure messaging service, directly.
German Data Privacy Commissioner Ulrich Kelber is also a computer scientist, which makes him uniquely qualified to comment on the potential consequences of the proposed new EU Copyright Directive. The Directive will be voted on at the end of this month, and its Article 13 requires that online...
If the Tor Project, the Tor network, and Tor Browser were to disappear, what would happen? Not only would millions of global, daily users lose access to Tor’s software, but the diverse ecosystem of privacy, security, and anti-censorship applications that rely on the Tor network would cease to function.
Meet two brothers working to preserve the Fulani language and the culture embedded within it.
On March 28 — after urging from dozens of civil society organizations — Facebook is set to launch its advertising archive API. This tool is intended to provide researchers, journalists, and users with transparency into political ads and audience targeting on Facebook.
Editor’s note: Since we closely follow China and the global nature of tech in general, among other topics related to innovation, here are highlights from a two-hour interview that Ren Zhengfei, the founder and CEO of Huawei (the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment and second largest…
A groundbreaking study from Just Facts has found that the poorest 20% of Americas consume more goods and services than the averages for most of the world�s richest nations.
Stack Overflow traffic during DEF CON shows what technologies are trending in the hacker community
Most efforts to prevent suicide focus on why people take their lives. But as we understand more about who attempts suicide
Researchers from Inserm and Université de Rennes recently identified a new bacterial toxin which they transformed into potent antibiotics active against various bacteria responsible for human infections.
I love clever solutions to complex problems. I seldom engage in daisyslots casino gambling just to solve complex algorithms and devise strategies. I've covered dozens of them over the years. But today, man, today's might just take the cake.Here's the thing: trail status widgets can get tricky.For example, Winter…
What inspires someone to become a software developer? Joel Spolsky and Clive Thompson discuss how the culture of coding has evolved over the decades and where they hope it’s headed next.
What can we learn about the Mueller Report from the PDF file released by the Department of Justice (DoJ) on April 18, 2019?
Why I've had to decide to not officially support Macs for Cogmind or my other software.
Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions lays out the devastating impact of the shrinking and consolidation of local news outlets.
