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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 580 posts.
EFF, along with eight other consumer-focused privacy advocacy organizations, has backed out of the National Telecommunications Information Administration’s multi-stakeholder process to develop a privacy-protective code of conduct for companies using face recognition. After 16 months of active...
Today, the WHO issued a report that says, in essence, processed meats and red meats are carcinogens. This has been reported in a variety of…
By Hand & Brain
A shorter version of this post ran as an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News on October 6, 2015. The ubiquitous blue “Like” or “Share” buttons that you see all over the Internet are hiding an ugly secret. Starting this month, Facebook will use them to track your visit to every Web page that displays...
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures
In fact, only of the lower house, the Sejm. During its current term, 460 deputies voted 5545 times since the 8th of November 2011. The Sejm website publishes the individual results of the votes as …
Note: This post was adapted from an answer I wrote on Quora. EDIT: I’m working on something that I hope will make things better. Check out interviewing.io. I’ve been hiring people in some capacity for the past 3 years. First, I was doing it as an engineer, then as an in-house recruiter, and now as […]
The European commission came to similar conclusions as those below - and limited the effects of its end-of-roaming-initiative to disallow a real competition between carriers from different European countries. Unfortunately, we will still suffer from limited competitions and widely varying offerings within the single…
“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.”
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Shortly after Microsoft Bing launched in 2009, researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet...
In 1999, America Online's volunteer chat room monitors sued the company for back wages. Do today's hot Internet companies risk the same fate?
All too often, new police surveillance tools are initially applied to only the “worst of the worst” and then slowly—but surely—expanded to include an ever-growing number of less culpable individuals. We’ve seen it with DNA collection. And now we’re starting to see it with GPS tracking. That’s why...
Since our report last week on Australia's Internet censorship bill, the bill did indeed pass the Senate yesterday, and will become the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act 2015. The new law provides an accelerated process for rightsholders to obtain court orders for ISPs to block sites...
In late October the video game streaming site Twitch.tv launched "Twitch Creative" , essentially giving people permission to stream non-video game related creative content on the site. To celebrate the launch they streamed all 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross in a giant marathon.
The only antidote to propaganda and malicious ‘leaks’ is transparency. After so much disinformation on my presentation at the Eurogroup of the Greek government’s position, the only response is to post the precise words uttered within. Read them and judge for yourselves whether the Greek government’s proposals…
– A Soviet-era political joke according to Wikipedia , though I've only seen it in an English text describing the C++ object model
There is a classic thought experiment in the field of artificial intelligence which is often used to explain how an AI might inadvertently cause the destruction of humanity as a by-product of tryin…
You don’t want to read this, and I take no pleasure in writing it, and no one really wants to hear it right now. But I believe it needs to be said. I join the world in grieving for the dead in Paris. I have grieved for the dead from…
Today is the start of my last week as an employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I will be leaving after nearly 15 years as EFF's President and Executive Director, having started as a Staff Attorney back in 1992. As I wrap up things here, I've been thinking a lot about where we've been...
On December 6, 2015, the Sendai Subway’s Tōzai (East-West) Line opened. The second line of a provincial Japanese city, this event passed entirely under the radar of the Western media and ev…
Here’s something that merits a lot of reddit gold. On Thursday, reddit published its first-ever transparency report covering all of 2014. It’s a summary of all the legal requests to take down content from the site as well as all government attempts to access reddit’s user data. Lots of companies...
A federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn took an admirable stand last week when he questioned the government’s authority to compel Apple to unlock a seized mobile device using the All Writs Act. That’s a general-purpose law passed in 1789 that allows a court to require third parties’ assistance to...
