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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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Positional Scarcity
Each day on Tech Twitter, we get up in the morning, open up the website, and then go see what it is we’re mad about. A few days ago, it was this: The concept of “pay to get a better place in l…
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Influenza A (H1N1) – How many bits does it take to kill a human? (2009)
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
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EFF and Bitcoin
EFF's position on Bitcoin donations in 2011. For an update, see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/eff-will-accept-bitcoins-support-digital-liberty and https://www.eff.org/pages/other-ways-give-and-donor-support.
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Please Go Away, Tim Berners-Lee
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A Court Order is an Insider Attack
Commentators on the Lavabit case, including the judge himself, have criticized Lavabit for designing its system in a way that resisted court-ordered access to user data. They ask: If court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access? The…
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Dear Google: Search Competition should be 1 Click Away so why 15+ on Android?
Google claims search competition is “only one click away.” So why does it take fifteen+ clicks to make DuckDuckGo Search or any other alternative the default on Android devices?
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Surveillance and the Internet of Things
The Internet has turned into a massive surveillance tool. We’re constantly monitored on the Internet by hundreds of companies—both familiar and unfamiliar. Everything we do there is recorded, collected, and collated—sometimes by corporations wanting to sell us stuff and sometimes by governments wanting to keep an eye…
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Rat Park Experiment: A New Theory of Addiction
We all learned this in DARE class. About the rats in a cage who can self-administer morphine who get addicted to the stuff, and then just hit that lever until they die. A seemingly keystone...
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New partnership changes everything for the DIY diabetes community
I don’t speak in hyperbole very often, and I want to make sure that you all ...
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Sony uses DMCA to silence speech that reveals its security flaws
Co-authored by Corynne McSherry and Marcia Hofmann For years, EFF has been warning that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can be used to chill speech, particularly security research, because legitimate researchers will be afraid to publish their results lest...
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A message from Lawrence Lessig [video]
The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is North America’s largest community-run open source conference.
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The Duty of a Scholar
There was a joke at the time that although the National Security Agency had opened up in recent years and started taking their defensive role more seriously, the one aspect of cryptography which they would never discuss publicly was side channel attacks — and this itself constituted a side channel, revealing the…
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Congress Is Poised to Introduce a Bill to Fast Track TPP So It's Time to Act Now
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks are stalling while the White House assures its trading partners that this secret trade agreement won't be amended when it comes back to Congress for ratification after the President signs the deal. That's why the Executive is scrambling to get its allies in...
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A Big Little Idea Called Legibility (2010)
James C. Scott's fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Imp rove the Human Condition Have Failed , examines how, across…
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The Social Smolnet
The Social Smolnet par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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Bye-Bye Mastodon, our account on Fosstodon.org was deleted yesterday
We discovered the Mastodon peer to peer social network in February 2019 from a customer suggestion and we loved it. The idea of having a decentralized social network, not dependent on one source is…
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Debt-related driver’s license suspensions in Ohio
More than 60 percent of Ohio’s driver’s license suspensions do not stem from bad driving; instead, they arise because the driver owes an unpaid debt. Debt-related suspensions (DRS) could prevent people from getting to work where they could make the money needed to repay the debt. In this report, we investigate whether…
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I Choose Optimism
I bet you are wondering about the title of this piece. Has Blumner gone bonkers? Doesn’t she know that the world is on fire with authoritarianism on the ris ...
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Suicide Attempters’ Long-Term Survival
Most efforts to prevent suicide focus on why people take their lives. But as we understand more about who attempts suicide
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US Cloud soon illegal in EU? US punches first hole in EU-US Data Deal
Trump paralysed the "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board" (PCLOB), a key element of the EU-US data transfer deal that allows EU-US data flows.
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Outschooling
A few months ago I posted some data on this blog that showed the growth of homeschooling in the US with almost 5% of K12 students being schooled at home. I wrote at the end of that post: This is a trend to watch and, possibly, to invest in Well, invest in it we did. […]