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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.
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CIA, MKUltra, and the cover-up of U.S. germ warfare in the Korean war (2022)
CIA & Army Counterintelligence involved in secret “processing” of U.S. POWs who confessed to using biological weapons against China, No…
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Annual EFF Awards: Alexandra Elbakyan, Library Freedom Project, and Signal
SAN FRANCISCO—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce that Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan, Library Freedom Project, and Signal Foundation will receive the 2023 EFF Awards for their vital work in helping to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all...
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Superrational
“Will Vicktoreya Keyneslee Beauxpensees please come see the principal right now?” said the voice over the intercom.
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EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems
Update: Open source OSes might be saved from being covered depending on the interpretation of EU regulation 2019/1150 2.2.c.
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2022 letter on life in China
Becoming a barbarian; an ideological revelry; lockdown; sweetgrass and banana leafs; crankiness; delightful animals; to the mountains
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EU "Chat Control" and Mandatory Client Side Scanning
On the 11th of October, Dutch parliament organized a hearing on the EU “Chatcontrol” proposal, with a focus on client side scanning. Dutch parliament had earlier passed two motions calling on the Dutch government not to support this proposal, but our government has declared it will ignore those motions. This hearing…
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I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?
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I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients
ChatGPT recently passed the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, but using it for a real-world medical diagnosis would quickly turn deadly.
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I was laid off in retaliation for anti-discrimination whistleblowing
In order to protect women, gender nonconforming folks, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community from suffering as my peers and I have, I feel ethically obligated to go public with my ex…
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Why TSA's Implementation of Facial Recognition Is More Dangerous Than You Think
Facial recognition is an invasive and dangerous surveillance technology. When the government moves forward with pilot programs that will, if fully implemented, subject millions of people on a daily basis to the technology that should give us all pause.
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Some new snippets from the Snowden documents
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment
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We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’). Despite the impressive technical ju-jitsu of transformer models and the billions of parameters they learn, it’s still a…
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Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation
The rapid rise of remote work over the last two years has rippled through society and the economy in a variety of ways. Amid many other negative social disruptions from the pandemic, there has been one positive change: remote work has provided some individuals and families with more work-related flexibility and time…
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Supreme Court declines to hear Wikimedia's challenge to NSA mass surveillance
On February 21st 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation circulated the below joint statement with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.…
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95% of Bay Area Cities Lost Zoning Authority
In 105 jurisdictions of the Bay Area, anyone can build any residential projected at any height or density so long as 20% of the units are for low income.
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Money Laundering and AML Compliance
A brief overview of what money laundering is, what financial institutions do about it, and why.
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New Hampshire on the cusp of enshrining software freedom into law
Libreboot – New Hampshire once again on the cusp of enshrining Software Freedom into law. YOUR HELP IS NEEDED.
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What the Goddamn Hell Is Going on in the Tech Industry?
Sweet merciful Jesus, I woke up this morning and my inbox was flooded with horrific stories about how employers treat people. I knew things were fucked, but this was so much worse than I imagined, and that's not even getting into the comments on Hackernews. I am going to dig into some of those emails, but first...
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The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.
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CCC Invites to the 37th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg
After a three-year break, the Chaos Computer Club will host its 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3) from 27 December to 30 December 2023. We invite you to the CCH in Hamburg for Germany's most...
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Adtech surveillance and government surveillance are often the same
In the absence of comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the United States, the targeted advertising industry, fueled by personal information harvested from our cell phone applications, has run roughshod over our privacy. Worse, the boundaries between corporate surveillance and government...
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So Long, Twitter and Reddit
It's been over three years since my last blog post. I think that the website code started to feel like it had bitrotted, and so making new blog posts became onerous. But I've taken the time to redo this website using Zig , so it's quite easy to add blog posts now, and plus I added dark mode .
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The age of the grift shift
For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the technologies it brings forward etc. And there are of course a […]
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Mastodon is doomed?
Mastodon won't be the next Twitter, and it's not because of Bluesky. The ideals and execution won't scale.
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Growing share of Americans favor more nuclear power
About six-in-ten U.S. adults now say they favor more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, up from 43% in 2020.