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The UK "Porn" Filter Blocks Kids' Access To Tech, Civil Liberties Websites
It fell to the UK Tories to actually implement the Nanny State. Too bad Nanny Tory does not want kinds to read up on tech web sites, or civi...
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 695 posts.
482
Documents Shed Light on Border Laptop Searches
The case of David Miranda got a lot of attention around the world after UK authorities were accused of abusing an anti-terrorism law to evade the normal constitutional restrains on police power and question someone because of their political associations. Well, a very similar abuse of power appears to have happened…
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Want to help the poor and transform your economy? Give people cash.
YEA,GOVERNMENT,STOP BEING SO CROOKED AND PUTTING THE MONEY IN YOUR OWN POCKETS SHARE WITH THE POOR AND NEEDY PEOPLE LIKE ME. I HAVE BEEN ASKING FOR HELP TO GET A HOUSING GRANT AND I HAVE EMAILED THE CROOKED GOVERNORS IN NORTH CAROLINA AND VIRGINIA AND ALSO SENATORS,CONGRESSWOMEN AND MEN AND ALL YOU SNOBS CAN DO IS TO…
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Features Firefox should implement to weaken Facebook's stranglehold of the web
Merk: Denne teksten er mer enn ett år gammel. Jeg kan ikke garantere at alt som står her fremdeles er riktig eller det jeg mener. Les likevel og skriv en kommentar om du lurer på noe! English: Old post, might be outdated.
485
A Court Order is an Insider Attack
Commentators on the Lavabit case, including the judge himself, have criticized Lavabit for designing its system in a way that resisted court-ordered access to user data. They ask: If court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access? The…
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Surveillance and the Internet of Things
The Internet has turned into a massive surveillance tool. We’re constantly monitored on the Internet by hundreds of companies—both familiar and unfamiliar. Everything we do there is recorded, collected, and collated—sometimes by corporations wanting to sell us stuff and sometimes by governments wanting to keep an eye…
487
Rat Park Experiment: A New Theory of Addiction
We all learned this in DARE class. About the rats in a cage who can self-administer morphine who get addicted to the stuff, and then just hit that lever until they die. A seemingly keystone...
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Wild Ideas
A wild idea is one that many people think is obviously quite unlikely. I'd say at least a third of these wild ideas are likely true. (Parenthetic links are to more of my writings .)
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How to defend yourself when your photo is ridiculed on Reddit
I was going to write a rant. But I'm tired. Plus it's better to be nice in situations like these. And I can't take on any more of the Inte...
490
Finding Sociopaths on Facebook
On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media. My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I’ll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways…
491
NSA's Surveillance Powers Extend Far Beyond Counterterrorism
Time and again we’ve seen the National Security Agency (NSA) defend its vast surveillance apparatus by invoking the spectre of terrorism, discussing its spying powers as a method to keep America safe. Yet, the truth is that counterterrorism is only a fraction of their far broader authority to seek...
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Why Netflix should buy AMC
Earlier today AMC announced they have secured the prequel to Breaking Bad, a show based on the popular supporting character, Lawyer Saul Goodman. What was particularly fascinating was that an artic…
494
How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system
I am currently too upset to be able to do a good job of writing this article concisely and effectively, so please be patient and read the whole rambling thing. Note also: I’m not upset about the existence of one such conference – the real problem are the publish-or-perish rules in colleges/universities that are…
495
The Myth of Japanese Longevity
Bioinformatics, genomics, and Javascript
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Deceptions, Misinformation, and Word Games Used to Mislead About Surveillance
It’s been two months since President Barack Obama first said that he welcomes a debate about NSA surveillance, which he once again reiterated last week at his press conference. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to have a real debate about a subject when the administration constantly and intentionally...
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Court of Appeal bans Bayesian probability
As of the 23rd May 2022 this website is archived and will receive no further updates .
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Reddit has the killer social network feature: anonymity
As a follow-on to my last post, about facebook needing the ability to forget, I'm going to put forward a premise - the Reddit's social featu...
505
Things You Can Do That Will Make You Happier
Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It's also no surprise that it's the Nr....
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GnuPG - 16 Years of protecting privacy
In case you are not automatically redirected, please follow this link to https://gnupg.org/blog .
508
Why high fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in US
Once in a while I come across an animated debate on health benefits of sugar vs. high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It is enzymatically produced mixture of glucose and fructose that approximately matches the chemical composition of sucrose, aka sugar. It is not this debate that is my concern; rather,…
509
CloudFlare and Free Speech
This question assumes the answer. A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.
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A simple solution to credit card fraud, and why you won't see it any time soon
This is the first in what will probably be a very long series of articles. Ultimately, this is the beginning of the story of why I stopped ...