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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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ICANN races towards regulatory capture: the great .org heist
Updates: EFF letter, PIR’s update; IGP’s insider take; ICANN resolution; Ways to act, Reg essay x2, Ohashi, Tim Berners-Lee response; Letters from ISOC(😇), Ethos(🌈), and…
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Who Americans spend their time with, by age
How do people across the world spend their time? How do daily activities differ across countries, and how do these differences matter for people’s lives? Explore data and research on time use.
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Economics of Minecraft
anecdotes from working over a minecraft economy
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We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
For many years developers were not particularly satisfied with Apple's AppStore. It creates an artificial frontier between users and developers. Developer can not inform users about updates, tips, issues or fixes, and users often turn to the AppStore with one star reviews and negative comments instead of reaching out…
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Get your loved ones off Facebook
I originally wrote this for my friends and family in 2015, to explain why the latest Facebook privacy policy is really harmful. It’s since been read b
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Researchers Could Have Uncovered Volkswagen’s Emissions Cheat If Not for DMCA
Automakers argue that it’s unlawful for independent researchers to look at the code that controls vehicles without the manufacturer’s permission. We’ve explained before how this allows manufacturers to prevent competition in the markets for add-on technologies and repair tools. It also makes it harder for watchdogs to…
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Court finds Fourth Amendment doesn’t support broad search of protesters’ devices
In a big win for protesters’ rights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned a lower court’s dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester’s devices and digital data and a nonprofit’s social media data.The case, Armendariz v. City of Colorado Springs, arose...
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The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden
The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes
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Saving Lydia
My 6 month old daughter was born with a genetic mutation that will leave her severely disabled. We can silence her mutation within months…
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Massachusetts Court Blocks Warrantless Access to Real-Time Location Data
There's heartening news for our location privacy out of Massachusetts this week. The Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest court, ruled that police access to real-time cell phone location data—whether it comes from a phone company or from technology like a cell site simulator—intrudes on a...
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Google Declaring War on the Web
In Yesterday’s IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web. (See longer description on their website.) TL;DR: They are pushing Search more into the “here’s your processed answer” direction that “AI Overviews” have established (you know, those AI snippets in current Search that are wrong about 10% of the…
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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002
What did people's desktops look like?
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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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New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
Thousands of previously unreleased records illustrate how government agencies sidestep our Fourth Amendment rights.
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It's Time to Break Up the NSA (2014)
The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission—protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies—has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era. Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the…
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I'm Testifying to Congress about Data Breaches – What Should I Say?
Edit: I'm putting this up front as a lot of people are asking for it - the hearing will be live-streamed on YouTube and there's already an embedded video on the hearing page [https://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/identity-verification-post-breach-world/] . There's a title I
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New German government calls for European ban on biometric mass surveillance
The newly-agreed German government coalition has called for a Europe-wide ban on public facial recognition and other biometric surveillance. This echoes the core demands of the Reclaim Your Face campaign which EDRi has co-led since 2020, through which over 65 civil society groups ask the EU and their national…
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They're made out of meat (1991)
Copyright, Terry Bisson, 1991 Originally published in OMNI, 1991, and featured in HARPER’S and around the internet since. It has even made its way into several books on consciousness and brain science. I’m surprised, pleased, and proud. But please do not reprint, perform, alter or adapt in any way without first…
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Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations
Wikipedia is the backbone of knowledge on the internet. Learn how the Wikimedia Foundation is safeguarding it under the UK Online Safety Act.
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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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The Web We Lost
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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Firefox removes core product support for RSS/Atom feeds
TL;DR: from Firefox 64 onwards, RSS/Atom feed support will be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product.
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Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley
Why “few successful startup founders grew up desperately poor”