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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 515 posts.
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Verizon made an enemy tonight
On a flight back to New York I read Level 3’s assessment of the latest round of the Netflix vs Internet Provider debacle. The summarized version is that basically Netflix is slow because Verizon refuses to add capacity to peer with Level 3. Fixing the situation would cost Verizon
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The Insecurity of Secret IT Systems
We now know a lot about the security of the Rapiscan 522 B x-ray system used to scan carry-on baggage in airports worldwide. Billy Rios, director of threat intelligence at Qualys, got himself one and analyzed it. And he presented his results at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit this week. It’s worse than you might…
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Government Authority Intended for Terrorism is Used for Other Purposes
The Patriot Act continues to wreak its havoc on civil liberties. Section 213 was included in the Patriot Act over the protests of privacy advocates and granted law enforcement the power to conduct a search while delaying notice to the suspect of the search. Known as a “sneak and peek” warrant, law...
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Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
Back to: The myth of heroism | Forward to: A footnote about the publishing industry
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Dear Google, am I pregnant?
Here in the UK, we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, which among other things includes an explicit right to privacy (considerably stronger than the implicit privacy rights acknowledged in the US, which are not enumerated directly by the US constitution).
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When Sued Don't Tweet
The employer of one of my coding heroes, John Carmack is currently being sued by ZeniMax over unspecified IP that he may or may not have taken with him to his new spot.
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Hostile AI: You're soaking in it
I was in a Facebook discussion about “Friendly Artificial Intelligence” — this is a buzzword from the Singularity Institute people. They be...
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Deconstructing Finnish
Now and then, as I continue trying to improve my Finnish language kyky (ability), I decide it’s high time that I actually understand the...
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YouTube's joke of a fair-use appeal process
Remember last month, when I was working on a screen saver and I reviewed all nine Hellraiser movies and made a supercut of every on-screen appearance of the Lament Configuration? As soon as I posted it, it was immediately blocked with seven content-ID matches. So I filed a DMCA fair-use counter-claim, because this…
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The myth of the fall
I was a historian before I was an activist, and I’ve been reminded recently that a lot of younger hackers have a simplified and somewhat mythologized view of how our culture evolved, one which tends to back-project today’s conditions onto the past.
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Negative comments
The Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven educational retreat for programmers in New York City.
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An age-old question
Back to: Let's put the future behind us | Forward to: On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
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Getting to work on diversity at Google
We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google. We now realize we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the is…
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It’s time to extend the US Privacy Act to EU citizens
Last summer’s Snowden revelations not only highlighted the urgent need for surveillance reform but also severely damaged relations between t...
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Please Stop Asking Me to Speak About Women in Technology
I was recently recommended as a pinch-hitter keynote speaker for a Linux conference by a friend who wasn’t going to be able to present due to a scheduling conflict. She put me in touch with the conference organizers, and they reached out to me with the exciting email subject “We want YOU to keynote [conference…
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The problematic culture of “Worse is Better”
Our industry has been infected by a dangerous meme, and it’s one that hasn’t been given its proper scrutiny. Like many memes that explode in popularity, “Worse is Better” gave a name to an underlying fragment of culture or philosophy that had been incubating for some time. I point to C++ as one of the first instances…
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Everything that is wrong with American capitalism, in one headline
Here it is, in the LA Times: " Comcast, Charter reach $20-billion deal, would swap customers in L.A. " Cable companies Comcast Corp. ...
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War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing
The Excessive Militarization of American Policing
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A History of Tug-of-War Fatalities
Ignore simple physics and your appendage could be amputated by a tug of war rope.