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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
Every day, corporations track our movements through license plate scanners, building detailed profiles of where we go, when we go there, and who we visit. When they do this to us in violation of data privacy laws, we’ve suffered a real harm—period. We shouldn’t need to prove we’ve suffered...
Just before a decisive meeting in Brussels, digital rights expert and former Member of the European Parliament Dr. Patrick Breyer is sounding the alarm. Using a "deceptive sleight of hand," a mandatory and expanded Chat Control is being pushed through the back door, in a form even more intrusive tha
An open letter from current and former CISOs, security leaders, and practitioners asking the public, employers, journalists, and policymakers to retire outdated security advice.
Shrouded in secrecy and isolated from the world, North Korea exudes an air of mystery. Hardly anything is known about the country except media stories about their dear leader, Kim Jong Un – h…
U.S. pharma companies should pay rather more of their corporate income tax in the U.S.—and start producing more of their best drugs in the U.S. as well.
An Open Letter To JD Vance From A Former CIA Officer On The Counterintelligence Risks Of Smartwatches Mr. Vice President, Congratulations on your ascendancy to the Vice President of the United States of America. While we are an apolitical platform, we wish you nothing but success, the country depends on you. In a rec
"Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught." -Balzac
A few days ago I got a sensationally stupid email from one of those websites that most of us probably have a subscription to, but which I will not give the oxygen of publicity by linking to[1]. The…
I’ve been thinking about why AI feels like such a destabilizing force for society, and it isn’t just the threat of even greater…
In many ways, America’s social safety net falls short of those of our liberal democratic peers, yet we have no shortage of policies intended to provide social protections. Why is that, and how can we fix it?
This year we are calling to FREE THE INTERNET. Your donation will help break the chains of censorship and surveillance. If you give now during the campaign, your donation will be matched by our supporters at Power Up Privacy. This means a $25 donation will have a $50 impact.
The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans.
When recognizing faces and emotions, artificial intelligence (AI) can be biased, like classifying white people as happier than people from other racial backgrounds. This happens because the data used to train the AI contained a disproportionate number of happy white faces, leading it to correlate race with emotional…
The Besenval Palace in Solothurn opened the museum « Der Kleine Prinz und seine Welt » dedicated to the Little Prince through the collection of Jean-Marc Probst.
Celebrated Italian author and scholar Umberto Eco (1932-2016) published an article in 1995 entitled Ur-Fascism . Eco grew up during the time of Mussolini. In the article, he jumps from memories of…
The new age of social-enabled apps
What can Apple do in the face of a UK order to weaken encryption worldwide? Decentralize iCloud, to start.
Explore OpenAI’s approach to balancing teen safety, freedom, and privacy in AI use.
If you think Tylenol is bad for babies, wait until you hear about rubella virus
The Sony Walkman is now iconic of the 1980s, eliciting nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of owning music, rather than renting it.
The comfort we get when offloading our cognitive load to LLMs is bad for us. Cognitive load should exist, and if we reduce it too much – if we stop thinking – we can actually unlearn how to think. Kids who always choose the easy route and copy their homework from other students eventually find […]
An interactive visualization — based on the Acquired Google Podcast Credits to Ben and David (who also appreciated this graph in the Acquired internal Slack!).
The EU can support the development of homegrown social media platforms to ensure European Union's digital sovereignty and shield it from foreign interference
Principal software engineer with deep experience in full-stack TypeScript, custom web browsers and real-time, media-focused systems.
What patterns do we see in RUM data during the April 28th power outage in Portugal and Spain?
We’ve heard some questions and concerns following our recent Terms of Service and Privacy Policy updates. We are thankful our community cares enough to
Criminal mafias are making massive profits from the illegal extraction and sale of sand for construction purposes.
Can We Terraform the Earth Using Life Itself?
The Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter. We took this decision since we feel X doesn't reflect Debian shared values as stated in our social contract, code of conduct and diversity statement. X evolved into a place where people we care about don't feel safe. You are very much invited to follow us on…
