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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 580 posts.
ICANN is currently considering a proposal that “domains used for online financial transactions for commercial purpose should be ineligible for [WHOIS] privacy and proxy registrations” [ PDF ]. Given the vagueness around what would count as “commercial purpose” (tip jars? advertising? promoting your Kickstarter?) and…
I.W.W. Poster By Dustin Guastella If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist. – K. Marx Recently a Chicago firm made headlines when it was revealed that they allowed their workers less than six minutes a day in the bathroom. Naturally, people were outraged, but this is an old…
Starting today, Flickr is happy to support Public Domain and Creative Commons 0 (CC0) works on our site.
I. H.G. Wells’ 1914 sci-fi book The World Set Free did a pretty good job predicting nuclear weapons:They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands…before the l…
How two psychologists teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings.
Facebook just announced support for PGP, an encrypted email standard, for email from them to you. It’s an interesting move on many levels, albeit one that raises some interesting questions. The answers, and Facebook’s possible follow-on moves, are even more interesting.
Los Angeles — Human Rights Watch, a nonpartisan organization that fights human rights abuses across the globe, filed suit against the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration late Tuesday for illegally collecting records of its telephone calls to certain foreign countries as part of yet another...
The referendum of 5th July will stay in history as a unique moment when a small European nation rose up against debt-bondage. Like all struggles for democratic rights, so too this historic rejection of the Eurogroup’s 25th June ultimatum comes with a large price tag attached. It is, therefore, essential that the great…
A day after my previous post, and things have been happening. SHORT TERM: First, I asked for people to send money if they couldn’t help any other way, and people have. This took away any conc…
This article outlines some of the federal government of Canada’s successful and unsuccessful attempts to weaken encryption standards.
A bipartisan group of congressional leaders has reintroduced the USA Freedom Act. The bill is an attempt to rein in the intelligence community's "Collect It All" strategy, and passing USA Freedom is a first, small step in the right direction. However, it has serious faults that should be addressed...
EFF joined more than sixty civil liberties organizations and public interest groups from across the world yesterday in calling upon the world's governments to support the creation of a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy. The special rapporteurs are independent experts...
Studies showed early on that kids who went through DARE weren't any less likely to do drugs. Why did schools keep using it?
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks are stalling while the White House assures its trading partners that this secret trade agreement won't be amended when it comes back to Congress for ratification after the President signs the deal. That's why the Executive is scrambling to get its allies in...
The Ministry of Culture has announced a national FM-switch off, to complete the transition to digital radio. Norway is making...
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 1, 2015, at the Strata+Hadoop World conference in New York City. The video version is here (20 mins).
The TSA says it is possible to fly without ID , but then goes on to state that you still have to prove your identity in some way. If the purpose is to thwart hijackings, then it should be sufficient to simply give anonymous passengers additional screening. But that's not the purpose of ID.
Baby carrots are just regular carrots cut up and polished down. They're also the biggest thing to happen to carrots since orange. How did it happen?
Warning: This post touches politics. The comments will likely be incendiary and polarizing. Don’t go into the comments if you don’t want to be annoyed or irritated. Many in the tech industry are taking these comments by Hillary Clinton yesterday as an ‘attack on Uber and the tech sector’: Meanwhile, many Americans are…
Buenos Aires is currently in the middle of electing its mayor and city council. With a first round that took place on July 5th, and a second round due on July 19th, the election is the first time Argentina's capital city has used an electronic voting system called Vot.ar, created by local company...
Trade negotiators have a saying—that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. What that means is that despite all of the deals that has been struck in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations so far, they remain tentative until each country signs off on the final agreement. A...
When people who care about technology look back at the year 2015, they will remember October as the month when the EU-U.S. Safe Harbor collapsed. An international legal agreement that has been in place for 15 years was invalidated in a single day. On Oct. 6, the Court of Justice of the European Union struck...
