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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 597 posts.
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EFF's Fight to End Warrantless Device Searches at the Border
EFF has been working on multiple fronts to end a widespread violation of digital liberty—warrantless searches of travelers’ electronic devices at the border. Government policies allow border agents to search and confiscate our cell phones, tablets, and laptops at airports and border crossings for...
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Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
The personal website and blog of Daniel Long Sockwell, a lawyer-turned-programmer with an interest in web development, open source, and making things as simple as possible.
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Australia’s vague anti-encryption law sets a dangerous new precedent
The Assistance and Access (A&A) law requires tech companies to help law enforcement agencies break into individuals’ encrypted data.
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Mozilla Re-Files Suit Against FCC to Protect Net Neutrality
This morning, the Federal Communications Commission officially published its order overturning net neutrality rules in the Federal Register. We had origina
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A sad update about a scissors maker that went viral
Back in 2014, a lovely short film by Shaun Bloodworth called The Putter went viral. The film shows Cliff Denton making scissors for Ernest Wright & Sons. Denton
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What Data Does Facebook Collect When I’m Not Using Facebook, and Why?
Explaining more about the information we get from other websites and apps; how we use the data they send to us; and the controls you have.
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Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
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What is happening in the Arctic is now beyond words, so here are the pictures
The climate emergency requires actions at emergency speed for a rapid transition to a post-carbon, safe-climate future.
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Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence
Air pollution can have a “huge” negative effect on cognitive intelligence – especially amongst older men – according to a study released this past August.
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Slow Software
What it means for software to be fast, and why most software is not.
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Sony Finally Admits It Doesn’t Own Bach
Here’s the thing about different people playing the same piece of music: sometimes, they’re going to sound similar. And when music is by a composer who died 268 years ago, putting his music in the public domain, a bunch of people might record it and some of them might put it online. In this...
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Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting
When someone goes to the lengths of making counterfeits of your products, it's at least a sign you're doing something right. And it deserves a minute of flattery. But when Chinese counterfeiters tool up and make copies of your product, send that inventory to Amazon, then overtake the real product's buy box by auto-lo
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Today, Europe Lost The Internet. Now, We Fight Back
Today, in a vote that split almost every major EU party, Members of the European Parliament adopted every terrible proposal in the new Copyright Directive and rejected every good one, setting the stage for mass, automated surveillance and arbitrary censorship of the internet: text messages like...
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Telling the Truth About Defects in Technology Should Never Be Illegal
Congress has never made a law saying, "Corporations should get to decide who gets to publish truthful information about defects in their products,"— and the First Amendment wouldn't allow such a law — but that hasn't stopped corporations from conjuring one out of thin air, and then defending it as...
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Things to know about the GDPR, Mozilla and Firefox
Has your email inbox been filling up with privacy policy updates? It seems like every service, app or subscription I’ve signed up for (including more tha
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My experience with Sarah Jeong, Jason Koebler, and Vice Magazine
Translator and proofreader’s note: There are large parts of this document that don’t parse well either from Chinese or from Naomi’s written…
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Mark Zuckerberg and his empire of oily rags
Surveillance capitalism sucks: it improves the scattershot, low-performance success-rate of untargeted advertising (well below 1 percent) and doubles or triples it (to well below 1 percent!).
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Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments from August to November. If you see something cool like this, email us at hn@ycombinator.com [mailto:hn@ycombinator.com] so we can add it to the next list. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Listening to The Shipping…
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Lessons learned from a failing local mall
The closing of the mall’s anchor store exposes how fragile the community’s business model is, providing an opening to shift approach.
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Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling
YouTube resolution down again? Through a collaboration with another Massachusetts university, this Northeastern team unveils exactly who’s responsible.
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The Internet of Unprofitable Things
Gather 'round children. Uncle Andrew wants to tell you a festive story. The NTPmare shortly after Christmas
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Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
Switching fully to card and app payments would put access to our money in the hands of private organizations for the first time in history.
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Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
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