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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
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The harmful impact of Audible-exclusive audiobooks
Amazon's creeping monopoly on the audiobook industry through Audible pushes bookshops and libraries out of audiobook distribution.
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Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)
A community edition of David MacKay's book — the original text, opened up so it can be updated.
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Remain Calm: The fox is still in the Firefox logo
If you’ve been on the internet this week, chances are you might have seen a meme or two about the Firefox logo. And listen, that’s great news for us. S
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Sony's Legal Attack on Quad9, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech
A public and free DNS service for a better security and privacy
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Global Encryption Day: Demand End-to-End Encryption in DMs
Today is Global Encryption Day, a day to highlight why encryption is critical for a safe, private internet.
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Problems coming for online publishing
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that “Facebook makes m…
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Bills Introduced by Congress Fail to Fix Unconstitutional NSA Spying
In the past two weeks Congress has introduced a slew of bills responding to the Guardian's publication of a top secret court order using Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to demand that Verizon Business Network Services give the National Security Agency (NSA) a record of every customer's call history...
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Attempts to Censor AntiPolygraph.org
AntiPolygraph.org has received a rather unpleasant letter from James D’Loughy, a lawyer representing NITV Federal Services, LLC (NITV), which markets a scientifically baseless voice-based lie detector called the “Computer Voice Stress Analyzer,” and its president, self-described “Renaissance Man” “Dr.” Charles Humble…
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Xinjiang University President Tashpolat Tiyip Sentenced to Death in Secret Trial
Source: Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia (1/22/19) A Death Sentence For a Life of Service By Amy Anderson Note: This article written by Amy Anderson is based on interviews with Tashpolat Tiyip’s…
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The Internet Archive Pushes Back on “Notice and Staydown”
The US Copyright Office sought comments in its ongoing study of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 512 safe harbor study. They are generally looking to find out how well the notice and takedown system is working for everyone—Internet platforms and users, as well as creators and copyright holders. We…
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A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
Over the last several months, I've witnessed many controversial discussions among my friends, in my San Francisco community, and on online forums about James Demore’s memorandum [https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320] . People of both genders are wrestling with the fact…
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Sports supplement creatine makes no difference to muscle gains, trial finds
People hoping to build muscle with the support of a creatine supplement might be disappointed by new research that shows it has little to no effect when taken at the recommended level.
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Clearing Up a Few Things About Facebook’s Partners
We're facing questions about whether Facebook gave large tech companies access to people's information and, if so, why we did this.
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Praising children for effort rather than ability (2021)
When parents praise their children's effort instead of natural ability, students learn that the work they put
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1,741 "informed" consents with one click? GDPR complaint filed
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
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New disclosures to our archive of state-backed information operations
Transparency is at the heart of everything we do at Twitter. That’s why we routinely disclose datasets of information operations we can reliably link to state actors.
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San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing
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...
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United Kingdom to introduce security labelling on connected devices
In a press release from the UK government on January 27th 2020 called “Government to strengthen security of internet-connected products”, the new law and i
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Companies hide negative news with unrelated press releases alongside SEC filings
A new study, forthcoming in The Accounting Review from Jessica Watkins, assistant professor of accountancy in the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, found that, alongside 8-K reports featuring negative news, managers tend to push out simpler, unrelated press releases to divert attention from the…
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Alleged $7.5B fraud in online advertising
Online advertising is often based around the idea of an "impression," but few of us actually know what that means. We assume it means some sort of interaction with a human being, but as it turns out, we're quite wrong. Today we dive into some staggering statistics with Samuel Scott.
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The Case for Software Craftsmanship in the Era of Vibes
From the Zed Blog: Working toward genuine, quality software in an era where code production is not the constraint anymore.