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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 658 posts.
Xinjiang, home of the China's muslim Uighur minority, has long been the world's laboratory for Internet repression. Faced with widespread local unrest, and online debate, China has done everything it can to enforce its vision of the Net in the region, from imprisoning bloggers and online publishers...
New EFF Report Maps Legal Threats to Free Expression in the Arab WorldFreedom of expression is a universal right, but the specific threats to it vary widely from country to country and region to region. As activists fighting for free speech worldwide, it is essential that we better understand the...
It is with deep regret that I announce the closure of Whitechapel Bell Foundry , the world’s most famous bell foundry and Britain’s oldest manufacturing company. Below you can read my interview with Alan Hughes, the last in a line of bell founders stretching back to 1420, who will retire next year at sixty-eight years…
Ayudamos a la comunidad a través de actividades cívicas constructivas.
I have a new draft paper with Aylin Caliskan-Islam and Joanna Bryson titled Semantics derived automatically from language corpora necessarily contain human biases. We show empirically that natural language necessarily contains human biases, and the paradigm of training machine learning on language corpora means that…
While there are countless examples of DMCA abuse, sometimes a story stands out. Last week, Samsung sent a series of takedown notices aimed at videos showing a GTA V mod in action. The modification replaced an in-game weapon with an exploding Samsung phone. Whether you think these videos are...
The title kind of says it all. How do I know? Because of this photo : That's a picture of the logic board of an iPhone 5C, the same mod...
Until just last week, the U.S. government kept up the charade that its use of a stockpile of security vulnerabilities for hacking was a closely held secret.[fn]For what it's worth, the government denies having a “Raiders of the Lost Ark style” stockpile of zero days.[/fn] In fact, in response to...
This is why we don't have a Facebook killer, and why we won't. We might have a 'better' Facebook, but it will still be a Facebook.
The Nobel Peace Prize 2016 was awarded to Juan Manuel Santos "for his resolute efforts to bring the country's more than 50-year-long civil war to an end"
The TurkeyBlocks monitoring network has detected restrictions on access to multiple social media services Facebook, Twitter and YouTube throughout Turkey beginning Friday Nov 04 2016 1:20AM local time, ongoing through into Friday ...
This’s time to keep my word and here’re the docs I promised you. It’s not a report in one file, it’s a big folder of docs devoted to Hillary Clinton that I found on the DNC …
Steven Pinker believes deeply in the power of reason to understand the world and ourselves. But can he convince Tyler?
David Halpern. The Centre for Central Banking Studies recently hosted their annual Chief Economists Workshop, whose theme was “What can policymakers learn from other disciplines”. In this guest po…
Today the draft text of the U.S.-Europe free trade agreement, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), was leaked by Greenpeace Netherlands. The leak reveals for the first time the current state of the text of 15 chapters and annexes, along with a confidential commentary from the...
Where did the common image of the socially-awkward, white, male programmer come from?
This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them.
EFF and over a dozen other organizations are urging U.S. lawmakers to oppose a dangerous bill proposed by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Lindsey Graham that would make the already-flawed Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) worse. The joint letter sent Wednesday explains that the legislation fails to...
In recent months, privacy and civil rights activists have increasingly recommended the use of Signal [1] , an instant messenger app developed by Open Whisper Systems (OWS). After Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in particular, many tweets recommended using hard disk encryption and the ostensibly…
There is a widely reported threat to our economy: robots are going to replace human workers. It is nothing new... In 1930, Keynes, the famous economist introduced the term "technological unemployment"... We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they…
To call what we have now as Capitalism, is just wrong. What we have bears little resemblance to even what I saw as a child in the US, let alone anything like what Adam Smith talks about. What we have is at best crony capitalism, and more likely straight corruption top to bottom, with a fake veneer of something called…
“Showing that they don’t care about me, or caring that I should know they don’t care about me, still denotes dependence.”
