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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,062 posts.
On April 13, 2026, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed into law S.B. 338 , which amends the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (“VCDPA”) to prohibit the sale of geolocation data. Notably, the VCDPA defines “sale” more narrowly than other state comprehensive privacy laws, as “the exchange of personal data…
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossibl
Today, the Norwegian Consumer Council has filed a complaint against Google. Based on new research Google is accused of using deceptive design and misleading information, which results in users accepting to be constantly tracked
Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incred…
This project has been an astonishing little journey. Many of my previous projects were characterized by an amazing outpouring of effort to build something highly intricate and ultimately invisible .
After my trip in Hamburg, Germany, for the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress, I left Germany for t
The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:
I'll be wording this post carefully as What 3 Words (W3W) have a tenacious PR team and, probably, have a lot more lawyers than I do. W3W is a closed product. It is a for-profit company masquerading as an open standard. And that annoys me. A brief primer. The world is a sphere. We can reference any point on the surface…
The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is c...
When unreasonable requests are followed up with "but you could have just said no!" Exploring the clashes of ask culture and guess culture, at home and at work.
80% of the people only need 20% of the features.
Censored Planet by salvey on Sketchfab The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of the world’s freest countries are not safe from internet censorship. A University of Michigan team used Censored Planet, an automated censorship tracking syste
While analyzing the phone of a Saudi activist infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, we discovered a zero-day zero-click exploit against iMessage. The exploit, which we call FORCEDENTRY, targets Apple’s image rendering library, and was effective against Apple iOS, MacOS and WatchOS devices.
Today, the European Parliament approved the ePrivacy Derogation, allowing providers of e-mail and messaging services to automatically search all personal messages of each citizen for presumed suspect content and report suspected cases to the police. The European Pirates Delegation in the Greens/EFA
Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
GPTZero's analysis 4841 papers accepted by NeurIPS 2025 show there are at least 100 with confirmed hallucinations
Machine-generated books are here. I bought one by accident.
Everything is going to hell and nobody seems to care
Net neutrality is in jeopardy again. We need another grassroots movement By Ashley Boyd, VP Advocacy A little over two years ago, the mood here at Mozil
AirPods are a fantastic product. However, the small annoyances that occur when using them don't allow it to fall under the category of Apple products that "Just Work".
On February 14, 2024, the Court of Appeal of Paris issued an order stating that Orange, a major French telecom provider, had infringed the copyight of Entr’Ouvert’s Lasso software and violate…
This article was written on the basis of information related to the so-called "8 December" case (see the footnotes for a global overview of the case, we focus on the "numerical part" of it in this article<fn>For a summary of the 8 December affair see in particular the testimonies available in thi
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The basic formula for Hacker News ranking has been known for years , but questions remained. Does the published code give the real algorithm...
