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Freenode commits suicide, is no longer a serious IRC network
Since this happened after I was banned from Freenode , I didn't get to observe this first hand, but this is the situation as I now understand it.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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Streaming Is Laying Bare How Big ISPs and Big Tech Work Together Against Users
HBO Max is incredible. Not because it is good, but because of how many problems with the media landscape it epitomizes. If you ever had trouble seeing where monopoly, net neutrality, and technology intertwine, well then thanks, I guess, to AT...
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Mozilla Presses Pause on Facebook Advertising
Mozilla is pressing pause on our Facebook advertising. Facebook knows a great deal about their two billion users — perhaps more intimate information than
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57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents
There is little public support for the sweeping and unaccountable nature of the National Security Agency surveillance program along with concerns about how the data will be used.Fifty-seven percent (57%) of voters nationwide believe it is likely the NSA data will be used by other government agencies to harass…
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Win for Fair Use in ‘Dancing Baby’ Lawsuit
San Francisco – A federal appeals court in San Francisco today affirmed that copyright holders must consider whether a use of material is fair before sending a takedown notice. The ruling came in Lenz v. Universal, often called the “dancing baby” lawsuit. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)...
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Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage
The Cornell ILR Wage Atlas shows who in New York state earns living wages and where, helping policymakers and other stakeholders to understand patterns of inequality.
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The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
Why did mental health fall off a cliff at the same time and in the same way in the USA, The UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand? Part 1 of 3.
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Japan has changed in important and visible ways
The 2020s are not the 1990s.
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Is Web3 anything?
The term “web3” seems pretty fluid and is being used as a label for a bunch of disparate ideas. Given that it’s a decentralized group describing a decentralized movement, that lack of focus isn’t exactly surprising. Almost by definition it’s going to end up being different things to different people.
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No Recent Automation Revolution
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning.
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How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)
If this isn't the famous robbery scene, from Arsenal MS. 5070 Boccaccio Decameron its as close as I can bother to get for a...
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The EU's Link Tax Will Kill Open Access and Creative Commons News
All this month, the European Union's "trilogue" is meeting behind closed doors to hammer out the final wording of the new Copyright Directive, a once-noncontroversial regulation that became a hotly contested matter when, at the last minute, a set of extremist copyright proposals were added and...
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Backblaze: Mounting Losses, Lawsuits, Sham Accounting, Insider Selling
Summary * Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) is a $250 million cloud storage and backup solution provider based in California that operates through two business segments: B2 Cloud Storage allowing “customers to store data” and “developers to build applications,” and Computer Backup that “automatically backs up data” from devices…
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Forget spaceships; I just want my music
A couple weeks ago, as my kids settled into the car, I asked like I always do, "what songs do you want me to play?" They have a range of favored earworms, from Baby Shark to Babaloo, and usually the songs are tolerable, at least. But a few albums, like Bluey's soundtrack, transcend the children's genre. They're…
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Google suffers from a digital petro curse
The profits that spew out of our ad-infested internet accrue to Google most of all. For the last couple of years, Google has seen an astounding $40 billion dollars per year flow into its coffers from US online advertising alone – a market in which it commands an astounding ~30% share. And then there's the…
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South Korea’s online security dead end
Websites in South Korea often require installation of “security applications.” Not only do these mandatory applications not help security, way too often they introduce issues.
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Plastic Money
You will sometimes hear someone say, in a loose conceptual sense, that credit cards have money in them. Of course we know that that isn't the case; our modern plastic card payment network relies on online transactions where the balance tracking and authorization decisions happen within a financial institution that…
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I Just Gave Up $4000 Per Month to Keep My Freedom of Speech
Wow. Four thousand dollars a month. It was Automatic Money, rolling in like crazy with no effort on my part, absolutely no overhead, and it was remarkably reliable. Almost $1000 every week, $130 ev…
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Google has killed Android (the brand)
There are days where a trend you noticed becomes absolutely visible. Today is one of those days. I have seen the Android brand disappear o...