1
My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
My smartest friends have bananas arguments about LLM coding.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 326 posts.
2
3
Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today
Some time ago, we were contacted by a group fighting against online CSAM, demanding that AdGuard DNS blocks the Archive.today website. This was only the beginning of a much larger story…
4
Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Patty Smith.
5
Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
EFF is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mark Klein, a bona fide hero who risked civil liability and criminal prosecution to help expose a massive spying program that violated the rights of millions of Americans.Mark didn’t set out to change the world. For 22 years, he was a...
6
What we talk about when we talk about sideloading
We recently published a blog post with our reaction to the new Google Developer Program and how it impacts your freedom to use the devices that you own in th...
7
F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree
For the past 15 years, F-Droid has provided a safe and secure haven for Android users around the world to find and install free and open source apps. When co...
8
Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes
No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue
9
Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade no-crawl directives
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.
10
11
EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
The highest court in the EU just reaffirmed that nuclear energy meets the scientific and environmental standards to be included in sustainable finance, and Greenpeace still refuses to budge.
12
France rejects backdoor mandate
In a moment of clarity after initially moving forward a deeply flawed piece of legislation, the French National Assembly has done the right thing: it rejected a dangerous proposal that would have gutted end-to-end encryption in the name of fighting drug trafficking.
13
Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model
We're ending our third party fact checking program and moving to a Community Notes model.
14
Accepting US car standards would risk European lives
Opening the EU market to vehicles certified under US standards would weaken the protections that save lives in Europe, say more than 80 civil society organisations and the administrations of Amsterdam…
15
Samsung embeds IronSource spyware app on phones across WANA
In recent months, we have received numerous reports from users across West Asia and North Africa (WANA) expressing alarm over a little-known but deeply intrusive bloatware application—AppCloud—pre-installed on Samsung’s A and M series smartphones. Without users’ knowledge or consent, this bloatware collects sensitive…
16
Multiple Russia-aligned threat actors actively targeting Signal Messenger
Russia state-aligned threat actors target Signal Messenger accounts used by individuals of interest to Russia's intelligence services.
17
“Captain Gains” on Capitol Hill
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
18
Chat Control Must Be Stopped
Chat Control is back to undermine everyone's privacy. There's an important deadline on October 14th, 2025. We must act now to stop it!
19
I have made the decision to disband Hindenburg Research
As I’ve shared with family, friends and our team since late last year, I have made the decision to disband Hindenburg Research. The plan has been to wind up after we finished the pipeline of ideas we were working on. And as of the last Ponzi cases we just completed and are sharing with regulators, that day is today.
20
Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy
Claude Free, Pro, and Max users can now opt in to having conversations used to improve models, with a five-year retention period for participants.
21
ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation
Families disappeared and isolated without legal access; one child with cancer deported without medication and pregnant mother deported as well
22
PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program
In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI. It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding, and navigating the intensive…
23
What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on
What do Americans die from, and what do the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News report on?
24
The Death of Daydreaming
What we lose when phones take away boredom and interstitial time
25
1 Trillion Web Pages Archived
On October 22, 2025, the Internet Archive celebrated an extraordinary milestone: 1 trillion web pages preserved and available for access via the Wayback Machine. Event Recaps & Recordings | Photos | Impact Stories | Support the Internet Archive | Press Kit Since 1996, the Internet Archive has worked with libraries and…
26
Lawmakers want to ban VPNs
It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of…
27
Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers
Apple's anti-competitive App Store policies are gouging consumers, enabling censorship, and harming privacy-focused developers. We're joining a lawsuit to restore internet freedom.
28
Age Verification Laws: A Backdoor to Surveillance
I’m old enough to remember when age verification bills were pitched as a way to ‘save the kids from porn’ and shield them from other vague dangers lurking in the digital world (like…“the transgender”). We have long cautioned about the dangers of these laws, and pointed out why they are likely to...
29
We regret but have to temporary suspend the shipments to USA
Starting August 29th, new regulations have come into effect. Both DHL and UPS currently have no working solution, so on their advice, we are temporarily suspending all shipments to the USA effectiv…
30
Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations
Wikipedia is the backbone of knowledge on the internet. Learn how the Wikimedia Foundation is safeguarding it under the UK Online Safety Act.