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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 694 posts.
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Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court
The Rodin Museum and the French Ministry of Culture threaten freedom of information and public access to cultural heritage
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On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
I’ve had Feeling Hard Or Hardly Feeling saved to my hard drive since 7-17-2005 without even knowing who made it. Just now bothered to find out.
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Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. Eighty percent of American households meet this income threshold.
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There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)
An important announcement There Is No Antimemetics Division has been picked up for publication by Penguin Random House! Find out more here. Everything below is for the original self-published version of the story only. An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring p...
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The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
Like many bits of Internet Culture, this simple image of an empty series of rooms represents a deep-repressed or recently-remembered memory of a common Internet Legend, or it's just a shot of nothing. If the answer is that it's a shot of nothing, let's get you up to speed. This image floated around message boards
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I Received an AI Email
At first I thought it was from a reader.
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Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)
From The World I Live In , by Helen Keller Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world....
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They have not been trained for this
The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) supports the three hackers who explained in detail at 37C3 how the Polish rail vehicle manufacturer Newag had manipulated its trains in such a way that they could only...
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Independent directors of 23andMe resign from board
Press releases from 23andMe Research Institute.
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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
Following a successful pilot project, the northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software) on the 30,000 PCs used in the local government. As reported on the homepage of the…
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Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check
This is a lightly edited transcript of my presentation today at the ACCSS/NCSC/Surf seminar ‘Cyber Security and Society’. I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to their conference & giving me a great opportunity to talk about something I worry about a lot. Here are the original slides with notes, which may be…
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MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
This is part of a series of profiles detailing the experiences of institutions that have unbundled or canceled big deal journal contracts. The aim of the series is to provide insights, lessons learned, and inspiration to libraries that might consider a similar move.
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If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity
Why does walking feel so intuitive when we’re in a city built before cars, yet as soon as we return home, walking feels like an unpleasant chore that immediately drives us into a car?
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Federal appeals court finds geofence warrants “categorically” unconstitutional
In a major decision on Friday, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” Closely following arguments EFF has made in a number of cases, the court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general,...
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Mourning Google
On March 15, 2010, I started a new job at Google . The fourteen years since that day feel like a century. The title of my announcement was Now A No-Evil Zone and, OK, I can hear the laughing from ten timezones away. I tried, then, to be restrained, but there are hardly words to describe how happy and excited I was. I…
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Where Have All the Websites Gone?
It feels like all the cool websites from the late 2000s are gone. But maybe we are looking at this the wrong way. Maybe it is us who vanished.
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How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
Although this article isn’t related to any of the 12 Challenges so far, it’s on a subject I’m developing for a potential future challenge.
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Does current AI represent a dead end?
Eerke Boiten, Professor of Cyber Security at De Montfort University Leicester, explains his belief that current AI should not be used for serious applications.
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EU to greenlight Chat Control tomorrow
[Update: Vote has been postponed to Thursday, keep up the pressure!] The Belgian EU Council presidency seems set to have bulk Chat Control searches of our private communications greenlighted by EU governments on Wednesday 19 Thursday 20 June. This confirms concerns that the proponents of Chat Con
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I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
JD Stillwater, Science Ambassador's blog.
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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
Last week, someone leaked a spreadsheet of SoundThinking sensors to Wired . You are probably asking "What is SoundThinking," because the company rebranded last year. They used to be called ShotSpotter, and their outdoor acoustic gunfire detection system still goes by the ShotSpotter name.
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Accountability sinks
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held dire...
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The New Internet
Tailscale's CEO, Avery Pennarun, explores the future of the internet, discussing the evolution of networking, the issues with today's complex systems, and how Tailscale is simplifying connectivity for developers with a new, more efficient approach. Discover the vision for a New Internet.
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“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.