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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,050 posts.
Today, the UK High Court has quashed a decision by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), and ruled that section 5 of the Intelligence Services Act (ISA) 1994 does not permit the issuing of general warrants to authorise property interference and certain forms of computer hacking.
The Technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution (TAG-VE) is an independent group of experts that periodically monitors and evaluates the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and assesses if specific mutations and combinations of mutations alter the behaviour of the virus. The TAG-VE was convened on 26 November 2021 to…
This article follows the case of Entr’Ouvert vs Orange on a GPL copyright violation. The case went to the Tribunal de Grande Instance in 2019 and went to the Cour d’Appel recently in 20…
Fastmail is the latest email provider to be blocked by Russia.
History is bound to repeat itself and it has almost every year
Recently the Surgeon General of the United States weighed in on the spread of disinformation on major platforms and its effects on people and society. He e
I made a goal for myself in January 2020 to stop using Google products by the end of the year. That might sound like way too generous a timeline, but…
Ethereum isn't fun anymore. There I said it. And although, the last time I developed an app using it has been more than a year ago, I stand by my word. Developing dapps on Ethereum has become ann
The latest announcements for Windows 11 have revealed that the next version of the Windows operating system will have very stringent hardware requirements. Some of them are, in my opinion, quite reasonable. For example, they’re finally dropping support for 32 bit X86 and legacy BIOS boot. These make sense, because…
A collection of my personal work, including essays, projects, and photos.
Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...
We identified nine Bahraini activists whose iPhones were successfully hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware between June 2020 and February 2021. The hacked activists included three members of Waad (a secular Bahraini political society), three members of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, two exiled Bahraini…
I entered Boston University Law School in the Fall of 2011. Like most law schools during the heyday of blogging, BU's prospective students website featured a handful of blogs that were written by current students. To get a blog on the site, you had to be selected among various applicants, and, if you were selected…
Updates: Our open letter made the WSJ, and has been tweeted by Matt Yglesias and others. See also Boaz Barak’s thread, and a supportive tweet from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Silicon Valley). If you…
From Cloudflare’s headline-making takedown of the Daily Stormer last autumn to YouTube’s summer restrictions on LGBTQ content, there's been a surge in “voluntary” platform censorship. Companies—under pressure from lawmakers, shareholders, and the public alike—have ramped up restrictions on speech,...
As a kid, my parents would open the television set, and we would get to watch whatever the state television decided we would watch. It was a push model. Some experts pick the content you need and they deliver it to you. You have little say in the matter. There was one newspaper in my … Continue reading Stop spending…
The Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery has just published my editorial, "Competitive Compatibility: Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants," explaining how interoperability was once an engine for competition and user empowerment – and how that ended.
Elite overproduction … describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite-members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.
Solarpunk, Permaculture, Sociocracy
Tackling income inequality could boost low-income children's vocabulary, study suggests
Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death
Mobile app store metrics from NetBlocks confirm the removal of a popular opposition election tracking app from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The incident comes as Russia ...
