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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 295 posts.
Openly sharing your work brings more attention to it, which is good, right? The answer, for me though, is often “it’s complicated.” This is what happened when I went to visit a giant tech company, in hopes for collaboration, but later found that they tried to patent some of my research instead!
With a broken heart I have to announce that EFF's founder, visionary, and our ongoing inspiration, John Perry Barlow, passed away quietly in his sleep this morning. We will miss Barlow and his wisdom for decades to come, and he will always be an integral part of EFF. It is no exaggeration to say...
The Free and Open Source 3D Creation Software — blender.org
Today, Mozilla filed a petition in federal court in Washington, DC against the Federal Communications Commission for its recent decision to overturn the 20
Long before we knew that it would be called Signal, we knew what we wanted it to be. Instead of teaching the rest of the world cryptography, we wanted to see if we could develop cryptography that worked for the rest of the world. At the time, the industry consensus was largely that encryption and...
Seaweed could be the key to stopping industrial agriculture from destroying the planet
Some people enter the technology industry to build newer, more exciting kinds of technology as quickly as possible. My keynote will savage these people and will burn important professional bridges, likely forcing me to join a monastery or another penance-focused organization. In my keynote, I will explain why the…
In Passing SESTA/FOSTA, Lawmakers Failed to Separate Their Good Intentions from Bad LawToday was a dark day for the Internet.The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing...
A new book examines the massive health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees.
Good news out of the Ninth Circuit: the federal court of appeals heeded EFF’s advice and rejected an attempt by Oracle to hold a company criminally liable for accessing Oracle’s website in a manner it didn’t like. The court ruled back in 2012 that merely violating a website’s terms of use is not a...
As part of the Internet Archive's aim to build a better Web, we have been working to make the Web more reliable -- and are pleased to announce that 9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the Wayback Machine. 22 Wikipedia Language Editions with more than
$ git push ... remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (2/2), completed with 2 local objects. remote: error: GH013: Your push could infringe someone's copyright. remote: If you believe this is a…
In The Big Short, investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” Based on that assumption, Burry shorted the mania- and …
3 dollars and cents arguments that definitively prove the need for people-oriented, walk-friendly places.
In their effort to prevent states from protecting a free and open Internet, a small handful of massive and extraordinarily profitably Internet service providers (ISPs) are telling state legislatures that network neutrality would hinder their ability to raise revenues to pay for upgrades and thus...
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Now, that’s not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks. The majority of them are generous and kind. Sure, a few are… just generous, I guess? But our active users regularly express their frustration that we haven’t done more to make outsiders feel more welcome. The real problem isn’t the community …
Earlier this year we funded Callisto [https://www.projectcallisto.org/], a non-profit dedicated to building tech to combat sexual assault and harassment. During their time at YC, we helped Callisto send a survey to 125 of the 384 female founders who have participated in YC.1 They were asked if they’d ever been…
Imagine you are a teacher at a public school, and you want to use a free recording of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in your classroom. As an author of music textbooks and a music theory professor, I am always looking for creative ways to develop teaching materials as Open Educational Resources (oer-musik.de), so that…
EFF has been working on multiple fronts to end a widespread violation of digital liberty—warrantless searches of travelers’ electronic devices at the border. Government policies allow border agents to search and confiscate our cell phones, tablets, and laptops at airports and border crossings for...
The Assistance and Access (A&A) law requires tech companies to help law enforcement agencies break into individuals’ encrypted data.
This morning, the Federal Communications Commission officially published its order overturning net neutrality rules in the Federal Register. We had origina
Explaining more about the information we get from other websites and apps; how we use the data they send to us; and the controls you have.
