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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
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The EARN IT Bill Is the Government’s Plan to Scan Every Message Online
Update 10/1/2020: The EARN IT bill has been amended since this blog post was published. We still oppose the bill.Imagine an Internet where the law required every message sent to be read by government-approved scanning software. Companies that handle such messages wouldn’t be allowed to securely...
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Why Does Infrastructure Cost So Much?
Why does infrastructure cost so much to build in the U.S.? The fundamental reasons aren’t technical. We’ve structured our postwar economy to use overspending on infrastructure as a way to induce short-term growth.
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The Notion of “Trolling” in Ancient Sanskrit
May 12, 2019 @ 4:36 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and philosophy , Logic , This blogging life
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Noyb.eu files 422 formal GDPR complaints on nerve-wrecking “Cookie Banners”
Today we filed 422 + 36 complaints on "cookie banners" with ten European Data Protection Authorities.
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Guinea worm disease reaches all-time low
Only 13 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported worldwide in 2022, pushing the disease closer to eradication, The Carter Center announced Wednesday. The figure is the lowest annual case total ever reported, following the record of 15 cases set just the year before. When The Carter Center assumed leadership of…
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EFF’s “Spying on Students” Report Highlights Tech Companies’ Data Collection
San Francisco—School children are being spied on by tech companies through devices and software used in classrooms that often collect and store kids’ names, birth dates, browsing histories, location data, and much more—often without adequate privacy protections or the awareness and consent of...
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Africa's Worst New Internet Censorship Law Could Be Coming to South Africa
Only once in a while does an Internet censorship law or regulation come along that is so audacious in its scope, so misguided in its premises, and so poorly thought out in its execution, that you have to check your calendar to make sure April 1 hasn't come around again. The Draft Online Regulation...
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AlgorithmWatch shuts down Instagram monitoring after threats from Facebook
Digital platforms play an ever-increasing role in structuring and influencing public debate. Civil society watchdogs, researchers and journalists need to be able to hold them to account. But Facebook is increasingly fighting those who try. It shut down New York University’s Ad Observatory last week, and went after…
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EFF Wins National Security Letter Transparency Lawsuit
A federal district court in San Francisco has ruled strongly in favor of our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records of how and when the FBI lifts gag orders issued with National Security Letters (NSLs). These records will provide a window into the FBI’s use of a highly secretive...
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Richard Stallman - Re: clang vs free software
This is the mail archive of the gcc@gcc.gnu.org mailing list for the GCC project .
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Update on beta testing payments in Signal
As the world stands today, the future of transaction privacy does not look great. The existing landscape is dominated by traditional credit companies, who over the past decade have been steadily pushing their networks for increased access to user data. They (and their data customers) are on a tra...
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Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
Trickle-down economic policies are destined to fail, research suggests. David Hope explains why the issue is so controversial.
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The Great Barefoot Running Hysteria of 2010
The year was 2010. “Ke$ha's Tik Tok” was topping the Billboard charts. Steve Jobs has just introduced a goofy new oversized iPhone called an “iPad”.
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r/ChangeMyView Is Graduating Reddit: Introducing ChangeAView.com
TL;DR: Reddit has been a great incubator for the r/ChangeMyView project, but we’re very excited to announce that…
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Amazon Introduces Re:Post, a “Stack Overflow” for AWS
The internet is an excellent resource for well-intentioned guidance and answers. However, it can sometimes be hard to tell if what you’re reading is, in fact, advice you should follow. Also, some users have a preference toward using a single, trusted online community rather than the open internet to provide them with…
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No Safe Harbor: How NSA Spying Undermined U.S. Tech and Europeans' Privacy
The spread of knowledge about the NSA's surveillance programs has shaken the trust of customers in U.S. Internet companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple: especially non-U.S. customers who have discovered how weak the legal protections over their data is under U.S. law. It should come as no...
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DEA Accepts Health Agency's Recommendation to Reclassify Cannabis
Determination must be reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget
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Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp
Moving from WhatsApp to Signal is an important action, right now. WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, has been involved in several cases of election interference: America in 2016, Trinidad and Tobago …
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Why California is so expensive: It’s not just the weather, it’s the regulation
The state of California has some of the most expensive housing in the country. In new research, Kristoffer (Kip) Jackson investigates why homes in the Golden State have come to cost so much. He finds that it's down to how land use is regulated; each new land-use regulation reduces a Californian city's housing supply by
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Finland Becomes a Member of NATO on Tuesday 4 April
Office of the President of the Republic of Finland Press release 10/2023 3 April 2023 Finland will become a Member of NATO on Tuesday, 4 April 2023. President of the...
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Proton Technologies awarded €2M from the EU
We are happy to announce that the European Commission has awarded €2 million to Proton AG, the parent company of Proton Mail and Proton VPN, to develop a suite of encrypted services.
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Zendesk to be acquired
A Zendesk é uma empresa de CRM que prioriza o atendimento e cria softwares eficientes e flexíveis para atender às necessidades de qualquer negócio. Saiba mais sobre nós
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To Delete Facebook or Not to Delete Facebook? That Is Not the Question
Since the Cambridge Analytica news hit headlines, calls for users to ditch the platform have picked up speed. Whether or not it has a critical impact on the company’s user base or bottom line, the message from #DeleteFacebook is clear: users are fed up. EFF is not here to tell you whether or not to...
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How the NSA obtains and uses airline reservations (2013)
A front-page report in today’s New York Times based on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden confirms that the NSA, like the DHS, uses airline reservation data as part of its profiling and social network analysis of US citizens and foreigners. Today’s report also raises new questions, and suggests some…
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How a Political Engineering Firm Exposed Their Code Base
Political data firm AggregateIQ exposed IT assets that raise questions for society about how technology is being used in recent US political history.