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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.
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The U.K. government is close to eroding encryption worldwide
The U.K. Parliament is pushing ahead with a sprawling internet regulation bill that will, among other things, undermine the privacy of people around the world. The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging…
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Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features
Apple today previewed software features for cognitive, vision, hearing, and mobility accessibility, along with innovative tools for individuals who are nonspeaking or at risk of losing their ability to speak.
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Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed by Mozilla
Mozilla’s latest edition of *Privacy Not Included reveals how 25 major car brands collect and share deeply personal data, including sexual activity, facial expressions, and genetic and health information.
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Someone stole my car and now I own hundreds of vinyl records
"Only in Los Angeles" has never rung more true
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The greatest risk of AI is from the people who control it, not the tech itself
The history of technology suggests that the greatest risks come not from the tech, but from the people who control it
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I skipped to the ending
When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app…
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Seeing like a bank
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
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The Windows 11 Trash Party
Thomas Bandt was setting up a new computer for his kid, and it gave him the opportunity to really look at what Windows has become over the years. Here's what was showing by default in the Start menu: First, there was news about a mass shooting that had occurred
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Ghost boat with GPS leads father-son duo to man overboard
When Andrew and Jack Sherman discovered an unmanned boat nearly 40 miles off the coast, they used its Garmin chartpotter to find the captain.
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Discord, or the Death of Lore
I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the on…
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Replace peer review with “peer replication” (2021)
As I’ve posted before and many others have noted , there is a serious problem with lack of adequate replication in many fields of science. The current peer review process is a dreadful combination of being both very fallible and also a huge hurdle to communicating important science.
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Web scraping for me, but not for thee
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy There are few, if any, legal domains where hypocrisy is as baked into the ecosystem as it is with web scraping. Some of the biggest companies on earth—including Meta and Microsoft—take aggressive, litigious approaches to...
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EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill
Ylva Johansson is the EU Commissioner in charge of the Chat Control Bill. In recent days she has taken part in several interviews in Swedish media and also spoken in front of EU parliament members.
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Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it,…
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I wish GPT4 had never happened
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Killing Community
This is a theory that’s previously been stated in log/39-normie-hypothesis.gmi, but I think it’s worth expanding on as it’s become very relevant with the recent Reddit shit-show actualizing just how bad that website has gotten along with social media in general. I think the model demonstrates how the…
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AI is making it easier to create more noise, when all I want is good search
We use Notion for the bulk of our knowledge management at CodePen. I have no use for an AI that can write for me.
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Petition to stop France from forcing browsers like Firefox to censor websites
The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers – like Mozilla's Firefox – to block websites chosen by the government.
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My Caste
Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes ( OBC Category ). OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population, therefore, about 500 million people belong to OBC category. In other words, 1 in 16 people in the…
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The Bond villain compliance strategy
Jurisdictional gamesmanship is a common strategy for crypto businesses. Here is how it worked out for Binance and its CEO. Spoiler: poorly.
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Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair
Denver legislators have just passed the first-ever agricultural Right to Repair bill. Today’s landslide 44-16 vote in the House follows successful votes in the Senate last month.
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Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations
This memo contains the thoughts and recountings of events that transpired during and after the release of information about the NSA by Edward Snowden. There are four perspectives: that of someone who was involved with sifting through the information to responsibly inform the public, a security area director of the…
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We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics
ChatGPT lies to people. This is a serious bug that has so far resisted all attempts at a fix. We need to prioritize helping people understand this, not debating the …
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Google vs. the Open Web
A few days ago, I made a social media post about Google vs. the Open Web. It received some responses, so I’ll reproduce it below with some...
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Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief
Disguising self-interest as virtue