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Bossware is a big legal risk
Monitoring employees in the name of productivity or security can cause a lot more problems than it solves.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 694 posts.
362
Response to DHH
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. …
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The xz backdoor thing reminds me of a story
This xz backdoor thing reminds me of a story I heard from friends that worked at a tech company that made cell phones. They had a great coder that worked on the project, he had put in work as a contractor for a few months, and due to the quality of his work he was hired in full time. After two months he simply stopped…
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Scale Ruins Everything
Your Startup Could Destroy Society
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Silicon Valley Tea Party a.k.a. the great 1998 Linux revolt take II (1999)
Anyway, here's what happened: Not to say that big brother is everywhere, but short of having microsoft people monitoring our lists and newsgroups (with wouldn't overly surprise me, after all they also tried a PR compain with magazines, posing as simple users who liked microsoft products), the announcement was…
366
"My Bike Is Everything to Me"
Former NBA player and TV sportscaster Bill Walton died on Monday at the age of 71. He was a quirky dude and as someone who’s been known to veer off onto seeming
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David Holladay, blindness technology pioneer, has died
This week brings sad news for our Duxbury Systems family. Our colleague, David Holladay, passed away in a hospital on Thursday, February 15th, following an accident at home that morning. David was a cancer survivor and valiantly battled multiple medical problems over his last five years.
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Democratising publishing
Thoughts on open source governance and how to create trust within technology, communities, and media.
370
Right to Repair: The Price Is Not Right
This article exposes the unfair reality of spare part prices. To make repair affordable, we need reasonable prices for original parts, clear acceptance for the use of compatible parts (third party, used or 3D-printed) and a solid ban on parts pairing.
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macOS Sonoma silently enabled iCloud Keychain despite my precautions
This is a follow-up to my blog post Updating from macOS Ventura to Sonoma silently enables iCloud Keychain . In the addendum to that blog post, I discussed a workaround, which was to delete my WiFi password right before rebooting into the updater. In a trial run on my M1 Mac mini, the workaround was successful.
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How do archivists package things? The battle of the boxes
It’s been a while since we posted one of our articles pulling back the curtains on archival work. To make up for that, here’s a special edition of our popular Archives FAQs and Facts series. For th…
373
The Death of NYC Congestion Pricing
And What is Says About the Institutional Problems in American Cities & Infrastructure
374
The Sphere
Las Vegas’ $2.3 billion immersive flagship takes a distressingly prophetic look inward.
375
Proposed UN cybercrime treaty has evolved into an expansive surveillance tool
EFF has joined forces with 110 NGOs today in a joint statement delivered to the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee, clearly outlining civil society non-negotiable redlines for the proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty, and asserting that states should reject the proposed treaty if these essential changes are...
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I joined landlord groups to persuade them to be better people to their tenants
1 sites already link to thisisalot.com, after 2 years online. Listed at $195 — keep the equity.
377
Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them
This is a follow-up to my blog post macOS Sonoma silently enabled iCloud Keychain despite my precautions from five months ago. The TL;DR of that blog post is that when you have iCloud enabled but not iCloud Keychain, updating from Ventura to Sonoma causes iCloud Keychain to be silently enabled. (I don't know yet…
378
Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's suicide
Genius is fragile. Success, even more so. What does it mean then for an artist to fail?
379
New standards for a faster and more private Internet
Cloudflare's customers can now take advantage of Zstandard (zstd) compression, offering 42% faster compression than Brotli and 11.3% more efficiency than GZIP. We're further optimizing performance for our customers with HTTP/3 prioritization and BBR congestion control, and enhancing privacy through Encrypted Client…
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Making the web fun again (2013)
Ever since I visited my first web site (via a slow modem to a library BBS running a text-based web browser), I have been ceaselessly pondering the nature of ...
381
Don't fall for the latest changes to the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act
The authors of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) unveiled an amended version this week, but it’s still an unconstitutional censorship bill that continues to empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like.
382
I bought an encyclopedia
NOTE: This is a companion post to my piece in Public Books, "The Encylopedia Project: Or, how to know in…
383
Golden Gate Claude
When we amplify the "Golden Gate Bridge" feature, Claude's responses focus on the bridge. For a short time, anyone can interact with this model.
384
Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio?
Last fall, under the aegis of Ham Radio Village , I was awarded a grant to take my one-day Tech class on the road. Ham Radio Village believes that more people in technical fields should have amateur radio licenses and that amateur radio is underrepresented in the hacker, STEM/STEAM, and maker communities. Currently…
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Tales from the Far Side
Sean Kleefeld's daily thoughts about comics and the comic industry.
386
Working Title (Insurance)
Title insurance is grossly overpriced relative to actual risks involved. Why is that?
387
Publishing AI Slop Is a Choice
Link to: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-overview-search.html
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Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age
Posted on Wednesday 21 Feb 2024. 1,196 words, 13 links. By Matt Webb.
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Notes on the Ivory Coast
I spent about ten days in the Ivory Coast, mostly in Abidjan, but also Yamoussoukro, Man, and Grand Bassam. (Note – The Ivory Coast is so French in culture and temperament that it insists on offici…