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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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Please Stop Writing Secure Messaging Tools (2015)
This is my first Patreon-supported essay, which went out a week early to my $10 and up subscribers. This was written in part in response to issues with the IWMF check-in tool, but it's something I've been concerned about for some time.
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Eton and all the murder (2019)
As recent politics illustrates, Eton has a reputation for producing pupils who achieve high office, but who are not sufficiently competent to hold high office. One thing that is rarely mentioned, however, is all the murder.
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Cloudflare CEO is lying to you about the bot traffic jump
A magic trick is a trick. It misrepresents reality. What the Cloudflare CEO published as bot traffic increasing, is a trick. He misrepresents reality.
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Mozilla’s Vision for the Evolution of the Web
Mozilla's mission is to ensure that the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. We believe in an Internet that puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe, and independent.
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ACLU Statement Opposing the 'Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terrorism Act' (2019)
In this letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, the ACLU urged Members to oppose H.R. 4192, Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terrorism Act. By reifying and broadening domestic terrorism authorities, H.R. 4192 would unnecessarily expand law enforcement authorities to target and discriminate against the very…
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Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant
Driving on Route-25a through East Shoreham, you’d never guess there was anything unusual about the gated road heading off toward the coast. But go down a ways… …and suddenly, it’ll appear through the trees… Long Island’s only nuclear power plant, closed and shuttered since it was decommissioned in 1994. Today, it sits…
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Decentralize Messaging
Twitter is funding a team to decentralize social media. I think they should start with messaging.
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EU Cyber Resilience Act: What does it mean for open source?
The final compromise text of the EU Cyber Resilience Act is now officially available, and various open source voices are currently opining on it. This is a complex act and other parts of the open source world (like the Eclipse Foundation and NLNet Labs) have been hard at work to advocate with the EU and member states…
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Handling attraction in a professional setting
I met my wife at a tech holiday party. I saw her from across the party and the rest of the people in the room disappeared…but this story doesn’t go the way you think. We didn’t ge…
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Futurist prediction methods and accuracy
I've been reading a lot of predictions from people who are looking to understand what problems humanity will face 10-50 years out (and sometimes longer) in order to work in areas that will be instrumental for the future and wondering how accurate these predictions of the future are. The timeframe of predictions that…
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Jeff Bezos Escapes Scrutiny from His Own Paper–and Its Rivals
A review of 190 articles about Amazon.com from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Bezos-owned Washington Post over the past year paints a picture of almost uniformly positive–ofttimes boosterish–coverage.
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Strength in Numbers: An Entire Ecosystem Relies on Tor
If the Tor Project, the Tor network, and Tor Browser were to disappear, what would happen? Not only would millions of global, daily users lose access to Tor’s software, but the diverse ecosystem of privacy, security, and anti-censorship applications that rely on the Tor network would cease to function.
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Pseudpocalypse
Here’s a conjecture: If you put any significant amount of text on the internet under different names, those identities can be linked using only the text itself.
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$800M to support small businesses and crisis response
Our commitment to support small- and medium-sized businesses, health organizations and governments, and health workers.
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When Facebook was Fun
It’s hard to remember, now , but there was a time when Facebook was the most exciting thing on the Internet.
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Trump's Trading Card Grift Is Worse Than You Think
Shell companies, rubbing elbows with international criminals, and worse in his scam of scams
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Surveillance forces journalists to think and act like spies
Once upon a time, a journalist never gave up a confidential source. When someone comes forward, anonymously, to inform the public, it's better to risk time incarcerated than give them up. This ethical responsibility was also a practical and professional necessity. If you promise anonymity, you're obliged to deliver…
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Two brothers invented an alphabet for their native language, Fulfulde
Meet two brothers working to preserve the Fulani language and the culture embedded within it.
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Welcome to Hotel Elsevier: you can check-out any time you like – not
In December 2021, Robin Kok wrote a series of tweets about his Elsevier data access request. I did the same a few days later. This here is the resulting collaborative blog post...
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Technofascism
In July 2016, Peter Thiel walked onto the stage at the Republican National Convention and told the crowd three things. First: “I build things.” Second: “I’m proud to be gay.” Third: “I’m proud to be a Republican.” What he did not say was that he had spent years funding a blogger named Curtis Yarvin, who wrote under…
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Mozilla and independent researchers publish guidelines for an ad archive API
On March 28 — after urging from dozens of civil society organizations — Facebook is set to launch its advertising archive API. This tool is intended to provide researchers, journalists, and users with transparency into political ads and audience targeting on Facebook.
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If your bank doesn’t like your startup’s blog, they may freeze your funds
Update: The Fabulis story had legs like I’ve never seen before. When I posted it to Hacker News it shot to number 1 in about 3 minutes and stayed there for 6 to 8 hours. A few hours later Robin Wauters from Techcrunch picked up on the story and since then it’s appeared everywhere from GigaOm and ValleyWag to FT.com …