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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting
On Wednesday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a story about how its staff discovered and reported a security vulnerability in a Missouri state education website that exposed the Social Security numbers of 100,000 elementary and secondary teachers. In a press conference this morning, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) said…
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I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc
A bungled Assetnote scan
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To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell
Four months ago I decided to buy a Tesla Model 3. What promised to be an exciting adventure in the world of electric cars, and some of the most advanced technology brought directly from Silicon Valley, ended up becoming a nightmare from which I still have not found my way out.
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Ten predictions (2004)
Ten Predictions Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Update, September 2015: I saw the HN thread about Dan Luu's review of this post, and felt people were a little too generous with the scoring. So I'll offer my own scores and justifications here. 1) XML databases will surpass relational databases in
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Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
Nothing on the internet lasts forever. But Disney’s 10-year mismanagement of FiveThirtyEight is its own story.
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Now that the FCC has repealed net neutrality, let’s adopt it in California
Today the Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality — a terrible step for the future of a free and open internet and for…
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I Like That the Boat Is Stuck
I know it's bad that the boat is stuck, but I like that the boat is stuck.
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Two years spent spamming spammers back
I created a bot to respond to these types of emails…
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Hacker News Hug of Deaf
About three years ago, I set up a tiny netcat loop on one of my Debian servers to accept arbitrary connections from the Hacker News (HN) community. The loop ran for 24 hours and did exactly three things whenever a client connected:
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Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
This case involves Apple’s handling of user-uploaded files hosted in private iCloud storage. Instead of adopting PhotoDNA to scan hosted files for CSAM, Apple created its own proprietary alternative, NeuralHash, which apparently wasn’t as good. So Apple U-turned on its...
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The rise of user-hostile software
On the trend of consumer software designed around developer convenience instead of user needs, from forced accounts to telemetry to privilege creep.
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The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud
Recently a Dutch hacker was able to take control of 4 million solar panel installations (FTM (Dutch), Euractiv, Victor Gevers). And this wasn’t the first time something like this has happened either (PV Magazine). As usual, huge thanks are due to the many beta readers and experts who helped improve this article with…
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Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”
Self-hosted and privacy-respecting blog software that puts the domain, data, and reader relationship back in your hands. Private alternatives to Medium, vetted since 2015.
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Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
Why is this economy so difficult to manage? The macro statistics are hiding the experience of being cheated.
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Civic Hygiene – avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state (2013)
Imagine, just for a moment, that the Government wanted to keep a record of everyone's sexuality. They need to know this detailed demographic data because it will be highly useful in civic planning. It will help them work out what provision needs to be made for sexual health services, how many children are likely to be…
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Building supercomputers for autocrats probably isn't good for democracy
The shameless spin around Stargate UAE
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My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
Romance fraud has been growing as an issue for years. It's not uncommon to see news stories with bewildered victims explaining just how deeply they'd been sucked in. After receiving a number of opener
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The Book of Graham
I emailed my 22 year old cousin Eric, who’s graduating Summa in Economics from Harvard, to see if he needed any help getting interviews...
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The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
Do you register with Google, Amazon or Microsoft to use the web?
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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all…
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Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)
Republished by Slate. Translations available in French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文) For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work corresponde…
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Web3 is centralized
I've long been interested in the decentralization of computing and communication in general, and of the web in particular. The trend of communication and information becoming more and more centralized in large corporations is worrying and worth fighting against, particularly from the perspective of systemic risk. I…
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NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur
The NYT's Taylor Lorenz falsely accuses a tech investor of using a slur after spending months trying to infiltrate and monitor a new app that allows free conversation.
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