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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 695 posts.
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Obama Promises Disappear from Web
Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants…
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A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
For 3,278 people, it was nonviolent offenses like stealing a $159 jacket or serving as a middleman in the sale of $10 of marijuana. An estimated 65% of them are Black. Many of them were struggling with mental illness, drug dependency or financial desperation when they committed their crimes. None of them will ever…
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Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you
TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. "nom nom" . This blog post is not for you.
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Lockdown
Officially, Google killed Reader because “over the years usage has declined”. 1 I believe that statement, especially if API clients weren’t considered “usage”, but I don’t believe that’s the entire reason.
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The Facebook experiment has failed
I am signed into Facebook right now. At a quick glance, the entire list of posts on the first screen are irrelevant to me. If I scrolled down I can find 4 stories I actually care about, from a list …
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Malibu homeowners foiled by $30K Kickstarter campaign
Can you believe it? Malibu homeowners intentionally obscure public beach access areas with fake signs and hidden access. This is not only ridiculously selfish, it is illegal. Enter this...
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Why Isn't Gatsby in the Public Domain?
When The Great Gatsby rolls out to theaters across the country this weekend, it will bring to the screen a story familiar to millions from a literary classic that's often dubbed the proverbial "Great American Novel." Here’s what many folks don’t know: even though the book was published nearly 90...
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Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
As one of the maintainers of eCryptfs , and a long time Thinkpad owner, I have been asked many times to add support to eCryptfs for Th...
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Xerox scanners and photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents
Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents Please see the “condensed time line” section (the next one) for a time line of how the Xerox saga unfolded. It for example depicts that I did not push the thing to the public right away, but gave Xerox a lot of time before I did so. <iframe…
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NASA paywalls first papers arising from Curiosity rover – I am setting them free
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
When was the last time you needed to buy a new PC? Two years ago? Three years ago? The last PC I built was in 2009. I had to upgrade because I pushed the previous one I built to the limit and that was
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Hacker News Folks Get Long Overdue Thanks
Well over a year ago, the Free Software and Linux Communities came together for a focused cause. To save my life. For those that d...
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Members of Congress Go Silent Over Prior False Testimony On Surveillance
The Republican and Democratic parties have achieved a bipartisan purpose in uniting against the public’s need to know about massive surveillance programs and the need to redefine privacy in a…
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Never Trust Facebook
I stopped using Facebook a long time ago, but I didn’t want to remove my account and have no visibility on how or what Facebook might be showing about me or someone using my name. So I decide…
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PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds
[ Update: PayPal have unfrozen the account, for now at least. Thank you for your support!]
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The Internet Is a Surveillance State
Polish translation I’m going to start with three data points. One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks…
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Happy 20th birthday Debian
Today is Debian's 20 anniversary. This anniversary would have been impossible without a strong community of users and developers. That's why for its commemoration, we asked the Debian community what Debian meant to them. Below you have a...
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How Money Moves Around The Banking System
Twitter went mad last week because somebody had transferred almost $150m in a single Bitcoin transaction. This tweet was typical: There was much comment about how expensive or difficult this would …