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FBI Harassment
Obligatory Disclaimer: Personal or political views presented within this post absolutely do not reflect those of my employer(s), client(s), and/or legal counsel.
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 354 posts.
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CIA Director John Brennan Pretends Foreign Cryptography Doesn't Exist
Last week, CIA director John Brennan told a Senate committee that there wasn’t any strong cryptography outside of the US. CIA director John Brennan told US senators they shouldn’t worry about mandatory encryption backdoors hurting American businesses. And that’s because, according to Brennan, there’s no one else for…
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Why the Sun 2 has a message “Love your country, but never trust its government”
Yesterday, Alec Muffet posted a few tweets regarding the Sun SPARC 2 bootloader’s DES routines.
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The internet has made defensive writers of us all
I was struck by this passage in Steven Pinker’s article about why academics’ writing stinks :
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Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro
The new MacBook Pro shows that Apple is finally becoming serious about developers.
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My Priorities for the Next Four Years
Like many, I was surprised and shocked by the election of Donald Trump as president. I believe his ideas, temperament, and inexperience represent a grave threat to our country and world. Suddenly, all the things I had planned to work on seemed trivial in comparison. Although Internet security and privacy are not the…
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An American Doctor Experiences the NHS Again
Two years ago I wrote about my experience in a London emergency department with my son, Victor. That post has since been viewed > 450,000 times. There are over 800 comments with no trolls (a fea…
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MathML is a failed web standard
Since I'm expecting more than my 1 2 regular readers to read this, let me add a preface. I've been managing the MathJax project for 4 years now. In the last two years, I've also been consulting for publishers regarding math-related workflows, in particular TeX-to-XML and XML-to-web, both on the back and front-end. Not…
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Why NSA Surveillance Scares Me
Nothing To Hide explains why you should care about surveillance even though you have nothing to hide. But it missed the point that most con...
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Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)
It's really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the last few instances of this that I've run across.
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My simplified response to Paul Graham's simplified essay
Paul Graham published a simplified version of his essay on income inequality . Here's my simplified response: It is true that many social...
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The Moral Economy of Tech
This is the text version of remarks I gave on June 26, 2016, at a panel on the Moral Economy of Tech at the SASE conference in Berkeley. The other panel participants were Kieran Healy (whose remarks are here ), Stuart Russell and AnnaLee Saxenian .
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Communicating with people on psychedelics
About 18 months ago I had a really cool idea: What if we could communicate with people who are high on LSD in such a way that sober people can’t understand?* I call this idea psychedel…
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To Know If the Election Was Hacked, Look at the Ballots
You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical…
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European Union dedicated questionnaire on the Encryption of Data
On both sides of Atlantic the debate around strong cryptography frequently resurfaces. Proponents of weakening cryptography or introduction of backdoors (or "golden keys") cite national security. Technologists and activists oppose such proposals, citing freedoms and cybersecurity. Regulating cryptography is of course…
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Nick Farr's 30c3 Jake Appelbaum story of abuse and harassment
Hi. I’m Nick Farr. (@nickf4rr) You can read what you probably came here for at archive.org But if you’ll allow me first: Bringing people together is my life’s work. The text that was originally …
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Why do so few humans kill themselves?
The always-excellent @ctrlcreep eloquently states a puzzle in 140 characters that it took me lots of words to express previously. This puzzle is expressed at the outset of C. A. Soper’s artic…
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NSA Hacked French President’s House
“Keith Alexander (Director of the NSA) told me he was disappointed because he never thought we would detect them and he even added: You guys are good.” Bernard Barbier French newspaper …
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Let’s replace Twitter with something much better
(There is also a Russian language version of this post available, translated and published by SoftDroid on 2017-04-12.) I love Twitter. I love that by following certain people, my timeline has become a stream of interesting and entertaining information. I love that sometimes I am able to fit my little publication just…
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The Villain of CRISPR
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things