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YouTube-dl's repository has been restored
Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 423 posts.
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It’s Time to Build
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the cause on one…
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Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
The design of "technical interviews" is hurting the tech sector.
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How journalists use youtube-dl
The popular free software project “youtube-dl” was removed from Github on Friday following a legal notice from the Recording Industry Association of America claiming it violates copyright law. The tool is widely used by journalists for various reporting purposes.
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American Academy of Sleep Medicine calls for elimination of daylight saving time
Public health and safety would benefit from eliminating daylight saving time, according to a position statement from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
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Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act
[21 April 2020—Hundreds of people are arriving here from this tweet, which calls me a “Harvard researcher” and suggests that this post and the three that follow are about “the ful…
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ICANN board withholds consent for a change of control of the .org registry
After completing extensive due diligence, the ICANN Board found that withholding consent of the transfer of PIR from the Internet Society (ISOC) to Ethos Capital was reasonable, and the right thing to do.
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We Chat, They Watch
WeChat communications conducted entirely among non-China-registered accounts are subject to pervasive content surveillance that was previously thought to be exclusively reserved for China-registered accounts.
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Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage
"Demoskene is an international community focused on demos, programming, graphics and sound creatively real-time audiovisual performances. [..] Subculture is an empowering and important part of identity for its members."
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How We Saved Dot Org
If you come at the nonprofit sector, you’d best not miss.Nonprofits and NGOs around the world were stunned last November when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that it had agreed to sell the Public Interest Registry—the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain (TLD)—to private equity...
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YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
Updates to our work supporting the integrity of the 2020 U.S. election.
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MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
Standing by its commitment to provide equitable and open access to scholarship, MIT has ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new journals contract. Elsevier failed to present a proposal that aligned with the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts.
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Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
Uncover fast-growing tech companies, track venture funds, and access verified founder contacts on one modern platform.
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DisneyMustPay Alan Dean Foster
Alan Dean Foster and SFWA President Mary Robinette Kowal discuss the non-payment by Disney of several contracts for works including multiple Star Wars and Aliens novelizations.
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A small restaurant owner on Google, DoorDash, and Grubhub
DoorDash & GrubHub charge restaurants an advertising fee and then use that money to pay Google to run advertisements that use our restaurant’s brand name to divert customers away from our website to our competitors on their platform. My name is Travis Stoliker and I’m a small restaurant owner in Lansing Michigan. O
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‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies
Censored Planet by salvey on Sketchfab The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of the world’s freest countries are not safe from internet censorship. A University of Michigan team used Censored Planet, an automated censorship tracking syste
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An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT
On Tuesday, June 23, Senators Graham (R-SC), Cotton (R-AR), and Blackburn (R-TN) introduced a bill that is a full-frontal nuclear assault on encryption in the United States. You can find the bill text here. It's been formally introduced as Senate bill 4051, which you can
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COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator
Mark Suzman announces the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard. The initiative aims to identify potential treatments for COVID-19, accelerate their development, and prepare for the manufacture of millions of doses for use worldwide.
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ACLU sues Minnesota for police violence against the press
We are facing a full-scale assault on the First Amendment freedom of the press.
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New German law would force ISPs to allow secret service to install trojans
A new law being proposed in Germany would see all 19 federal state intelligence agencies in Germany granted the power to spy on German citizens through
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Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?
If Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, is silenced, others will also be gagged either directly or by the fear of persecution and prosecution
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French bar owners arrested for offering free WiFi but not keeping logs
At least five bar owners in Grenoble, France have been arrested for providing WiFi at their businesses without keeping logs. The bar owners were arrested
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The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)
A global league table of mobile data costs. The average cost of one gigabyte (1GB) compared from over 5,600 mobile data plans in 237 countries.
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Cloudflare and the Wayback Machine, joining forces for a more reliable Web
Cloudflare now populating and using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in its content distribution network application Cloudflare and the Internet Archive are now working together to help make the web more reliable. Websites that enable Cloudflare’s Always Online service will now have their content automatically…