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Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely
We already put legal limits on financial, medical, military, transportation, and agriculture technology. Why not online tracking?
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 312 posts.
92
TSA Master Keys
Someone recently noticed a Washington Post story on the TSA that originally contained a detailed photograph of all the TSA master keys. It’s now blurred out of the Washington Post story, but the image is still floating around the Internet. The whole thing neatly illustrates one of the main problems with backdoors…
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China
The most important story of 2014 that most people ignored was the Chinese economy overtaking the US economy. (This is using the purchasing power parity metric, which incorporates differences in...
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Google, Our Patron Saint of the Closed Web
Lately there’s been a barrage of articles about how Apple is destroying the open web (because “app store, lol”) and it is Time Something Was Done About This: Apple’s paranoid appr…
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Locked doors, headaches, and intellectual need
You know those things that, once you learn about them for the first time, you start seeing them absolutely everywhere? Recently, that’s been my experience with problem-solution ordering issues. They keep cropping up: not just in the context of gam...
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Things the media does to manufacture outrage
People are so sensitive these days! People are just offended by every little thing! Millennials, amirite?!
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Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
This is a story about McGill education students that cannot calculate an average, and the professor who admitted he didn't care. Fina...
101
Why I am pro-GPL
Last night at OSCON I attended the lightning talks (here called "Ignite Talks"). Most of them were pretty good (I especially loved Emily Dunham's "First Impressions (the value of the 'noob')" talk), but the last talk of the night was titled "Why I don’t use the GPL" by Shane Curcuru, "VP of Brand Management at the…
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Tired of Safari
Yesterday, in reaction to pointer events becoming a W3C recommendation, Tim Kadlec published an important piece about Apple’s huge influence on the mobile web.
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The sky's gone dark
Back to: Brief hiatus | Forward to: Tanks! Why tank stories make great tech myths
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Ta'izz
I wake up to a gorgeous morning in Ibb. This time I’ve slept through the morning call to prayer and the sun is well up in the sky. Out the window there’s a view of a regular city against a backdrop of green mountains, with some construction equipment in the near foreground, and it takes my groggy mind a minute to…
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Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban
Brazil blocked Whatsapp for 48 hours, which benefits Telegram, it has gained more than 1 million new users and it seems like it keeps incre...
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Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile
Amit Singhal in 2011 showing a comparison of search volumes from mobile and “early desktop years”. Photo by Niall Kennedy on Flickr. Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search, let sli…
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How bad are things?
One “advantage” of working in psychiatry is getting a window into an otherwise invisible world of really miserable people. I work in a wealthy, mostly-white college town consistently ra…
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Google seems to have broken email forwarding
Basically: I'm finding it impossible to reliably convince Google that email from my employees, to my employees, is not spam. I run my own mail server, but most of my employees use Gmail. So I have forwarding set up: employee@dnalounge.com simply forwards to employee@gmail.com. When sending mail using their Gmail…
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The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
More than fifteen years ago, in response to decreasing ad rates and banner blindness , web advertisers and publishers adopted pop-up ads .
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Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide
In this post, I’m going to talk about suicide, and why I’m still on this planet. These are stories I’ve kept secret from my family, girlfriends, and closest friends for years. Recently, however, I had an experience that shook me—woke me up—and I decided that it was time to share it all. So, despite the shame I […]
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Questions about the Sunday Times Snowden Story
Official website for UK-based journalist Ryan Gallagher.
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Why 451?
Today, the IESG approved publication of “An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles”. It’ll be an RFC after some work by the RFC Editor and a few more process bits, but effectively you can start using it now.