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It Can Happen to You
A few days ago, a fascinating article about Grand Theft Auto Online made the rounds of the tech news ecosystem.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
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$1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog
This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is sa…
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EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
Today, the European Parliament allowed the suspicionless mass scanning of private communications ("Chat Control 1.0") to pass, a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor,
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Facebook is an attack on the open web
Dave Winer won’t link to Facebook posts from his blog. I don’t either.
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Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution
The Shirky principle is the adage that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. More broadly, it can also be characterized as the adage that “every entity tends to prolong the problem it is solving”.
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A Protocol for Dying
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing
20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired . I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
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But what if I want a faster horse?
But what if I really want a faster horse? | exotext
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Your Computer Isn't Yours
There have been several updates appended to this page as of 2020-11-16, please see below. Also available in: Türkçe Français Español Português Português…
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Facebook is cooked
Through the mirror into the lightly-clothed AI gooniverse
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The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
Trust me, I counted.
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The Machine Fired Me
It was 7am when my phone rang. Instead of an alarm, it was my recruiter disturbing me from a pleasant dream. It was too early for a phone call or to be caught off guard, so I did not answer. I went to
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Everything I own, owned
Turning Claude loose on the firmware of five USB and WiFi peripherals, and finding a command shell in a microphone, a defeatable webcam activity LED, and unauthenticated memory writes over the network.
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Outlawed by Amazon DRM
Bekkelund.net er en blogg om teknologi, samfunn og politikk skrevet av Martin Koksrud Bekkelund
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My Resignation from the Intercept
The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles.
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Someone at YouTube needs glasses
Opened YouTube and was greeted with this abomination:
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The Amazon tax
It’s not technically a tax. Taxes produce valuable public benefits, like medical research and parks. This is simply legal theft. Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ad…
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It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds
The very short version: it is madness to continue transferring the running of European societies and governments to American clouds. Not only is it a terrible idea given the kind of things the “King of America” keeps saying, the legal sophistry used to justify such transfers, like the nonsense letter the Dutch cabinet…
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Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
google@play-store: sudo rm -rf org.mtransit.android*
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Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
Well, as of sometime on December 5th a huge number of the archivists that were scrambling to rescue archives from Yahoo Groups, had their {e-mail addresses} apparently banned so they can no longer…
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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
src= alt="Always has been astronaut meme" / "Wait, the singularity is just humans freaking out?" "Always has been." Everyone in San Francisco is talking about t
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Google Memory Loss
[Update: As of Jan 1, 2023 this is fixed! Thanks to Danny Sullivan and John Mueller of Google for figuring out what was going on. Yay!] I think Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web. I think I can prove it. Google’s competition is doing better. [Update, Feb. 2022: It’s still happening.]
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Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
Supposedly today we have a lot of browsers to choose from - Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. Having choices is a good thing, right? Nobody wants to relive the time of almost complete Internet Explorer domination again. Unfortunately our choices are significantly fewer than…
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The dead economy theory
We can laugh at them but we have to take this seriously