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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,062 posts.
In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it: Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April
That’s a quote from Cindy Li — “We're all just temporarily abled”. I first heard it in Sara’s course and it’s been on repeat in my mind ever since June 6th…
Adobe isn’t exactly a beloved company these days. People begrudgingly use their stuff, because the Creative Suite is an industry standard (read: monopoly) or there are simply no worthwhile alternatives,...
For more than a decade, consumer rights groups (including EFF) worked with technologists and companies to try to standardize Do Not Track, a flag that browsers could send to online companies signaling that their users did not want their browsing activity tracked. Despite long hours and backing from...
By Jonathan Mayer and Arvind Narayanan. Blocking cookies is bad for privacy. That’s the new disingenuous argument from Google, trying to justify why Chrome is so far behind Safari and Firefox in offering privacy protections. As researchers who have spent over a decade studying web tracking and online advertising, we…
Digital platforms are struggling, meanwhile a 136-year-old book retailer is growing again. But why?
This blog is intended to be a place to share ideas and results that are too weird, incomplete, or off-topic to turn into an academic paper, but that I think may be important. Let me know what you think! Contact links to the left.
What happens when you responsibly disclose a critical vulnerability exposing personal data - including that of minors - and the organization responds with legal threats instead of a thank you?
I got an email from Network Solutions — where I still have two domains, originally registered in the ’90s — that informed me I have been enrolled in their WebLock Program.
What is the difference between Chat Control 1.0 and Chat Control 2.0? A clear overview of both EU laws, their timelines, and where things stand today.
Seaweed could be the key to stopping industrial agriculture from destroying the planet
Phoenix, Arizona—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit today against Proctorio Inc. on behalf of college student Erik Johnson, seeking a judgment that he didn’t infringe the company’s copyrights when he linked to excerpts of its software code in tweets criticizing the software...
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. Alex Tabarrok writes about how “when the FDA fails to approve a good drug, people die but the bo…
For various reasons, I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection. I don’t want to go into the first point any further for…
The internal logic of the world’s strangest corporations
I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in? I return to…
As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis. People are literally token-maxxing themselves into hospital beds, scrambling to capture some of that market value before everything is automated away. I can’t blame them. Models keep getting better, programmers are being laid off left and right…
Catalonia, with Barcelona as its capital, is currently one of Spain’s seventeen autonomous comunities. It has a long story of pro-independence movements, and has even declared itself independent in the past. Nowadays, the political climate is very heated up. A majority of catalan people want to hold a referendum for…
I’m declaring defeat. Infinite scroll has won. There is an endless supply of interesting things to consume online, and there are teams and teams of very smart people working very hard to get me to keep watching. One more video means one more metric counter incrementing, one more engagement click, one more step towards…
It was on the news this mroing, Mozilla will stop developing FirefoxOS phones , and the top Hacker News comment really resonated with me. Sure, IoT is the future, and it would be great if we had more nifty stuff there ( shameless IoT privacy plug ), but these headlines make the bad taste that I’ve had in my mouth ever…
Richard Branson's blog - where he shares his thoughts on business, Virgin news, leadership, life, family and the global issues he cares about the most
Link to: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1182348757360234497
Here’s a little “fake stats in the wild” gem that I think you and your followers will find at the least somewhat amusing.
On Tuesday, June 23, Senators Graham (R-SC), Cotton (R-AR), and Blackburn (R-TN) introduced a bill that is a full-frontal nuclear assault on encryption in the United States. You can find the bill text here. It's been formally introduced as Senate bill 4051, which you can
A weird thing is going on with Google search in Norway right now. Spammers are taking over.
A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it
I was browsing the web today, as I often do, with my iPhone on the can. (Yeah, ...
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