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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Professor Steven J. Murdoch
Mixed appraisals of one of the Internet’s great friends (or foes), Wikipedia, are reflected in the slightly dystopian article “List of Wikipedia Scandals”, which sits below a Wikipedia web address. Scrutiny aside, billions of users routinely flock to the online, anonymously editable encyclopedia knowledge bank for…
Join us to celebrate FreeBSD Day! FreeBSD Day, celebrated on June 19, commemorates the launch of the FreeBSD open source operating system and recognizes its pioneering and continued impact on technology. On June 19, 1993, an email thread on an early BSD list proposed project names for a new open source UNIX…
The online advertising ecosystem is broken. The majority of digital advertising revenue is going to a small handful of companies, leaving other publishers with scraps. Meanwhile users are on the ...
You can be identified by how you type, even behind proxies and Tor. Protect yourself with KeyboardPrivacy.
Want to learn more? Learn To Count to a Billion in Korean in 15 Minutes ! Or Learn to Read Russian in 15 Minutes !
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
It’s easy to take for granted just how good we have it as software makers selling on the internet. This is truly a unique period in human history with unprecedented commercial freedom. It bears celebration and recognition. Let me count the ways I love thee, unregulated internet: Access t…
On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft , and everyone who came, for a really great time.
Facebook must stop further transfers of European personal data to the United States, given that Facebook is subject to US surveillance laws (like FISA 702 and EO 12.333).
If you want to build principled software, avoid becoming VCware. Stay user-supported. It is now possible for tiny teams to build principled software that mil...
The NSA isn't spying on you. They don't have to. They just outsource it to businesses. Back 20 years ago, there was a conspiracy theory ...
The Yorba Foundation, a non-profit group that produces open source Linux desktop software, reported last week that it was denied tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status by the IRS. The group had waited nearly five years for a decision. The IRS stated that, because the software Yorba develops can be used...
In 1998, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent 5,718,632, on a method for avoiding “unnecessary wastage of time” in video games. What’s transpired in the 17 years since then can best be described as an unnecessary wastage of time. Namco’s patent covers “auxiliary games” that a player...
If you’d like, you can listen to an audio version of this page. It includes all the contextually relevant bits of music, and a few ad libs not included in the text. But it doesn’t include the links and images, naturally.
A new European Southern Observatory (ESO) study has found that current proposals to launch over 1.7 million satellites into orbit, including extremely bright ones, would have “devastating consequences for astronomy.” According to the study, no more than 100 000 faint satellites, below naked eye visibility, should…
National rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big differences by decade: Violence…
Not really. As a counter example, gold is clear and very old ponzi. It's ok. And as a more general argument, crypto does have utility. For circumventing capital controls, buying drugs or laundering money. So there will be constant supply of new depositors who needs that and willing to pay. I would not bet on crypto…
