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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 330 posts.
Starting 2027, Google will block apps on Android devices whose developers have not registered with Google, paid, and given their ID. It’s fair to say that Google is becoming Apple: Your device, their rules.
Cunyan Ma’s interactive tool exposes the power structure that extracts low-wage labor from data workers in the Global South to make everyday AI algorithms function.
More than 93,000 visible appearances of brands promoting unhealthy food and drink, alcohol, gambling and speculative products were recorded during coverage of the largest FIFA World Cup in history, new research has found. Unhealthy food and drink brands accounted for more than seven in ten, with 65,722 appearances.
Research has confirmed for the first time that people with active gambling accounts who receive regular ‘free bets’ and other direct marketing offers place a lot more bets, spend far more, and suffer greater related harms than gamblers who have opted out of such offers.
In an easterly suburb of Mykolaiv, drinking water flowed from kitchen taps, as it has since last year thanks to a small off-grid solar field tucked inconspicuously into its midst. Paul Hockenos reports.
Political bias in AI measures where every major AI model stands on charged political and ethical questions: run many times, no web search, plotted with error...
Most think social media leads to manipulation and division, but they also say it informs people and gives them a voice in politics.
The vinyl record is an analog medium. How can it be affected by the loudness war? So what’s the impact?
The dreams of a forgotten movement from the 1930s live on
Germany's far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party has confirmed that it has suffered a security breach, after a hacker published what appear to be hundreds of thousands of the controversial political party's internal emails.
In this piece, two researchers from PLA-affiliated National University of Defense Technology argue that Starlink will negatively impact global stability, in light of its clear military applications, increased risks of accidents and collisions in space, and SpaceX's close relationship with the U.S. military. The…
CISA lost a third of its staff and its acting leader uploaded sensitive docs to public ChatGPT, while China sits inside U.S. critical infrastructure.
The FIDE Ethics & Disciplinary Commission (EDC) has issued its decision in disciplinary proceedings involving former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik .
dict.cc requests users to consent to the tracking by 1,741 "partner" companies. This makes it impossible for people to know what happens to their data
The concept of “surveillance pricing” is just one part of a much larger problem and business model: corporations maximizing their profits by invading our privacy. The all-too-common business model is to systematically harvest, collate, and store as much of our personal data as possible, and then...
I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb people don’t know they’re dumb. There’s even video of a fantastic pastiche of Turandot’s famous aria, Nessun dorma…
ER visits for gambling disorders doubled after single-event sports betting was legalized and Ontario's online gambling market expanded.
The smartwatch for children that Gustaf Blomqvist hacked in his thesis turned out to be a security disaster. The watch had an insecure network service that anyone could access via the internet.
The UK new car market grew by 24.0% to reach 149,247 registrations last month, according to the latest figures published by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT). The increase reflects...
New markets, new ideas, and new creators are actually what copyright is supposed to promote, not restrict. Using copyright to lock in existing gatekeepers and massive rightsholders’ profits helps neither the public nor individual artists.
Iran is in the midst of one of the world’s most severe communications blackouts. This post uses Kentik data to detail how this historic event unfolded, where this event lies in the context of previous Iranian shutdowns, and finally discusses what might be in store next for Iran.
The DRUGS Act (‘Domain Reform for Unlawful Drug Sellers Act, H.R. 6352 & S.3399) is legislation that would rob you and millions of Americans of daily medications that keep them healthy and alive. Worse yet, the legislation is backed by Big Pharma front groups.
Journalists are thanking the Internet Archive for their respectful preservation of news and history and for being an important resource for journalists. This letter is coming at a time where many major media outlets are questioning whether to allow the Wayback Machine to continue to preserve journalism.
In the previous article, we explored the importance of standards: how the unspoken agreements governing electrical sockets, paper sizes and file formats form the foundations of a world in which choices remain open and power is not concentrated in the hands of a single player. We concluded with a question: if open…
Gland, Switzerland, 9 April 2026 (IUCN) – The emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal are now both Endangered, according to The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™. Climate change in Antarctica is leading to changes in sea-ice that are projected to cause the emperor penguin population to halve by the 2080s, while…
Psiphon, a software company that helps internet users under oppressive regimes evade online censorship, plans to leave Canada if the lawful-access bill passes.
Humans are the only primates with a population-wide hand preference. A new Oxford-led study, 'Bipedalism and brain expansion explain human handedness', published in PLOS Biology, traces it back to bipedalism and brain expansion.
