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One universal antiviral to rule them all?
Taking inspiration from a rare mutation that makes people impervious to viral diseases, a Columbia researcher is developing a therapy that could bestow this superpower on the rest of us.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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The OG Social Network: Other People’s Websites
“Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That’s Google’s stated mission. But what if the world's information becomes…
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A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials
Exploring the Applecore style
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Cisco Must Be Held Accountable for Aiding China’s Human Rights Abuses
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging a federal appeals court to reinstate a lawsuit seeking to hold Cisco Systems accountable for aiding in human rights abuses by building the Chinese government a system that Cisco officials knew was intended to identify—and facilitate...
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IPinside: Korea’s Mandatory Spyware
Banking websites in South Korea can only be used with IPinside installed. This application collects lots of data about the user, and it makes that data accessible to each and every website. The protection is inadequate.
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Thoreau 2.0
This is a written version of a talk I gave on September 21, 2013 , at the XOXO conference in Portland.
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Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower
Sexism in tech is out of hand, and talking about it is risky business.
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The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is
[This post is adapted from our forthcoming book, Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future.] Today we want to clarify something important about preserving government information. There is a difference between the government changing a policy and the government erasing information, but the line…
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Google endorses the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are beginning to recognize the Internet’s transformative impact on trade.
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Staying with the US Digital Service
A few months ago, I took a leave of absence from Google to do a stint with the US Digital Service. A lot of people know about the US Digital Service because they helped rescue the healthcare.gov we…
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Apple crushes one-man repair shop in Norway’s Supreme Court
Norwegian small business owner and repairer Henrik Huseby lost his legal battle against $1 trillion company Apple in Norway’s Supreme Court.
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Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
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WhatsApp Rolls Out End-To-End Encryption to Its Over 1B Users
End-to-end encryption has just gone massively mainstream. In an update on March 31st, the Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp quietly pushed an update adding end-to-end encryption enabled by default to its chat and call functionality. They announced the change publicly on Tuesday, allowing...
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CNIL imposes a financial penalty of 50M euros against Google
This page is no longer available. Order to comply or sanctions issued by the CNIL may be made public. In this case, a time limit shall be specified in the decision. Once this time period has expired, the organisations that have been given formal notice or sanctioned are no longer identified in the public decision. For…
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While crypto bro scammed clients, reporters scammed readers
Before Bankman-Fried’s transition from financial genius to possible financial criminal, he received little scrutiny in the media.
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Industrial Literacy
When you know these facts of history, you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it
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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
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Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook
Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do.
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AntiPolygraph.org appears to have been “de-listed” from Google on key searches
Search DuckDuckGo for “polygraph” and you’ll find AntiPolygraph.org, which hosts more documentation on polygraphs than any other site on the Internet, in the top 10 results. The same is true for searches on “polygraph” with Microsoft’s Bing search engine (in the United States), with Russia’s Yandex search engine, and…
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The strength of a monopoly can be guessed at by calling customer support
If you were an alien hovering above planet earth on a quick visit and trying to find out quickly which were its most dominant companies, you could probably do worse than try to reach their customer…
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Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox
UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of t
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Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition
In this regularly updated article, which is without doubt the most comprehensive list of Linux distributions' problems on the entire Internet, we only discuss their main problems and deficiencies (which may be the reason why some people say Linux distros are not ready for the desktop) while everyone should keep in…
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United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency
The Federation of American Scientists applauds the United States for declassifying the number of nuclear warheads in its military stockpile and the number of retired and dismantled warheads.
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Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
Open letter from an Android developer to the Android community and especially to Purnima Kochikar, Director of Google Play, Apps & Games…