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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
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Eight days later: Kbin, Lemmy, the landed gentry, and the rise of “threadiverse”
Draft! Work in Progress! Feedback welcome!
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Who does your assistant serve?
ChatGPT and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
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Teaching open-source software in North Korea
In 2016, I went to North Korea to teach a class of masters students how to contribute to open source software . Here’s an image from one of my lectures:
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Software Freedom Conservancy: New Strategy for GPL Enforcement
Software Freedom Conservancy, the only organization actively engaged in General Public License (GPL) enforcement and compliance work for Linux, announces today a new strategy toward improving compliance and the freedom of users of devices that contain Linux-based systems. The new work has received an initial grant…
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Global deforestation peaked in the 1980s
There was a marked acceleration in deforestation in the 20th century. But, global deforestation peaked in the 1980s. Since then, it has slowed.
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Slow software for a burning world
This page has moved to https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/slow-software-for-a-burning-world/ .
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The Test
Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO and wearer of the most midlife crisis looking leather jackets in the world, was on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Now I don’t really want you do go through all of what was being said in that recording/writeup. It’s painful. You feel your mental capabilities decaying with every minute of listening ……
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Digital Echoes and Unquiet Minds
There's a psychological burden of digital life even heavier than distraction.
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Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi
AI, history, and Soviet sci-fi
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Three AM 911 call, 9 AM salesman
A few days ago, the smoke alarms in my house went off at 3am, so we got up and took it seriously when we smelled smoke everywhere. But after 20 minutes of searching high and low, we couldn't find a source, so as a precaution, we called 911 to
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Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance
This is a wild and hopeful story: grad students at Northeastern successfully pushed back against invasive digital surveillance in their workplace, through solidarity, fearlessness, and the bright light of publicity. It's a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the "shitty technology adoption curve."
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Crowdfunding Backer Patented My Project
I never thought about patents much. I just wanted to make stuff and share it with others. Then one day someone else patented my work.
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The Sphere
Las Vegas’ $2.3 billion immersive flagship takes a distressingly prophetic look inward.
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Proposed UN cybercrime treaty has evolved into an expansive surveillance tool
EFF has joined forces with 110 NGOs today in a joint statement delivered to the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee, clearly outlining civil society non-negotiable redlines for the proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty, and asserting that states should reject the proposed treaty if these essential changes are...
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Hamburg's Stadtpark: A Park Built to Be Used
In 1914 Hamburg built a park for people to use rather than admire, and more than a century later that is still what it is.
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Schneier: The Dishonest Minority: Security and its Role in Modern Society
Three months ago, I announced that I was writing a book on why security exists in human societies. This is basically the book’s thesis statement: All complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective—and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives—as…
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Fog Revealed: A guided tour of how cops can browse your location data
In Part 1 of our series on Fog Data Science, we saw how when you give some apps permission to view your location, it can end up being packaged and sold to numerous other companies. Fog Data Science is one of those companies, and it has created a sleek search engine called Fog Reveal that allows cops to browse through…
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Court Opinion Finding NSA Surveillance Unconstitutional to be released
Update: In response to EFF's FOIA lawsuit, the government has released the 2011 FISA court opinion ruling some NSA surveillance unconstitutional. For over a year, EFF has been fighting the government in federal court to force the public release of an 86-page opinion of the secret Foreign...
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1984
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire […]
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Startup Won't Give in to Motivational Health Messaging's $35k Patent Demand
Trying to succeed as a startup is hard enough. Getting a frivolous patent infringement demand letter in the mail can make it a whole lot harder. The experience of San Francisco-based Motiv is the latest example of how patent trolls impose painful costs on small startups and stifle innovation. Motiv...
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Net Neutrality Alive and Well in Canada
The CRTC today released the final chapter (for now) in its net neutrality governance framework, creating policy that establishes strong safeguards against net neutrality violations and severely restricts the ability for providers to engage in zero rating practices. When combined with the federal government's clear…
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The singularity is close?
Or "Why we're all in denial about the robot apocalypse"
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Self-driving cars will "cruise" to avoid paying to park
If you think traffic in city centers is bad now, just wait until self-driving cars emerge on the scene, cruising around to avoid paying hefty downtown parking fees.