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What happened to innovation?
There’s a lot of debate about whether or not the pace of innovation has slowed, and if so, what that means. After some particularly brutal pitches that felt like Saturday Night Live parodies of...
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 454 posts.
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You are committing a crime right now (2012)
Are you reading this blog? If so, you are committing a crime under 18 USC 1030(a) (better known as the “ Computer Fraud & Abus...
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How likely is the NSA PRISM program to catch a terrorist?
Recent revelations about PRISM, the NSA’s massive program of surveillance of civilian communications have caused quite a stir. And rightfully so, as it appears that the agency has been grante…
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Where “nothing to hide” fails as logic
Every April, I try to wade through mounds of paperwork to file my taxes. Like most Americans, I’m trying to follow the law and pay all of the taxes that I owe without getting screwed in the process. I try and make sure that every donation I made is backed by proof, every deduction is backed by logic and documentation…
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The Jobs Are Never Coming Back
I just watched former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s TED Talk. She provides some nice insight as to what it is really like as a politician trying to grapple with the new realities of t…
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Alcoholism in Antarctica
This is a post over two months in the making as it’s pulled together some hard times from Pole. I hope it helps someone. While I stand by what I’ve done and my justifications, I can’t say they give me great comfort. Today is Midwinter in Antarctica. It is one of the most important dates … Continue reading "Alcoholism…
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PRISM? Come to Israel to study our surveillance state
It seems that those who were astonished, abhorred, enraged or outraged from finding out that the National Security Agency (NSA) tracked millions of united states citizens and did so with the cooperation of numerous internet service providers, telecommunication companies and web-based hosting services had not even…
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Stop Saying Bitcoin Transactions Aren’t Reversible
One of the criticisms leveled at Bitcoin by those people determined to hate it is that Bitcoin transactions are irreversible.
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Cameron Proves Greenwald Right
Readers know I have been grappling for a while with the vexing question of the balance between the surveillance state and the threat of Jihadist terrorism. When the NSA leaks burst onto the scene, …
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Open letter to Sal Khan
Dear Mr. Khan, A year ago, I expressed my concerns on the Washington Post’s blog that your decimal place value videos and exercises failed to incorporate very basic knowledge about how people…
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Patent Troll Forced To Settle Frivolous Lawsuit Against One-Man Business
This story will circulate a lot today. I’d like to suggest a more informative and accurate headline than the likely “Lodsys dismisses a lawsuit and donates to charity”.
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Can Apple read your iMessages?
About a year ago I wrote a short post urging Apple to publish the technical details of iMessage encryption. I’d love tell you that Apple saw my influential crypto blogging and fell all over t…
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How I attacked a fellow student
I’m a college student studying abroad at the University of Pennsylvania, studying a mixture of CS, Physics and Music. This semester I decided to take a course CIS551: Network and Computer Security, eager to learn about the field. This is the story of how as part of the course, I compromised the security of one […]
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The madness of the bailout in Cyprus
Last night the finance ministers of the eurozone decided on a bailout package for Cyprus. The small country with around 1 million inhabitants has an overstretched banking sector that is in dire straits. The primary reason for this is that the Cypriotic banks hold a lot of Greek sovereign debt – debt that took a…
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Elsevier steps up its War On Access
I thought Elsevier was already doing all it could to alienate the authors who freely donate their work to shore up the corporation’s obscene profits. The thousands of takedown notices sent to…
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A skeptical response to Musk's hyperloop
There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it’s invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish…
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1984
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire […]
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Unshackle the Middle Class
Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to
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Behind the scenes of the Pirate Bay trial
Process of law failed on so many accounts in the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a...
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The forbidden railway: Vienna - Pyongyang (2008)
ABOUT ME My name is Helmut and I was born in 1980 in Graz (Austria). Trains were my hobby since childhood. My 2nd hobby is travelling. Du...