The Right to Attention in an Age of Distraction
We are living through a crisis of attention that is now widely remarked upon, usually in the context of some complaint or other about...
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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
We are living through a crisis of attention that is now widely remarked upon, usually in the context of some complaint or other about...
“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…
Once people had recovered from the shock of seeing both a power button and a real-time clock on a Raspberry Pi, one of the most commented-on features of the new platform was the small, vertical, 16-way FFC (Flat Flexible Cable) connector on the left-hand side of the board, which exposes a single-lane PCI Express…
Joanna Rutkowska recently gave a presentation titled “Reasonably Secure Computing in the Decentralized World (An Operating System Architect’s Perspective)” at a public event hosted by The Golem Project in Berlin, Germany called “Golem and Friends: Data, Security, Scaling and More….” The...
22nd May 1990. The two Yemens, north and south, become one. The mood of the world seems to be for the dissolution of old animosities. In that same week, East and West Germany sign a treaty to begin reunification, the US and USSR agree to destroy their chemical weapons, and the World Health Organisation stops…
A court filing unsealed late Wednesday shows that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) made a highly misleading argument to an appeals court in October during a hearing on the constitutionality of National Security Letters (NSLs). On October 8, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued before the...
As you might remember, the FDA stomped on 23andMe for using too many irresponsible genetic tests that purported to tell you things about yourself and your health with limited support. They eventual…
Congress has begun debating the TAKE IT DOWN Act (S. 146), a bill that seeks to speed up the removal of a troubling type of online content: non-consensual intimate imagery, or NCII. In recent years, concerns have also grown about the use of digital tools to alter or create such images, sometimes...
Programming Zen is a blog about programming and emerging technologies, authored by Antonio Cangiano, a Software Development Manager and AI Evangelist at IBM.
Not all publications are on a financial deathwatch. Cook’s Illustrated takes no ads and charges for access to its recipes online. According to “Let’s Invent an iTunes for News,” the publication has 900,000 print subscribers (and 100,000 newsstand buyers) and is thriving online with …
Fior di Battaglia = Flower of Battle = Flos Duellatorum , a combat manual created in the first decade of 15th cent. "Like people today,...
Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and leading cybersecurity experts today urged the Supreme Court to rein in the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—and protect the security research we all rely on to keep us safe—by holding that accessing computers in ways that...
I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I only recently figured out why. I had to tackle a simple question do so:
Got some time to kill and want to read a meandering essay by an algorithm with a short attention span? Tell us how many minutes you want to spend reading and a starting topic, and we'll whip something up.
Faces transmit social information about goals and motivations that can help learners overcome the inherent difficulty of sharing a teacher's visual perspective, new Cornell psychology research finds.
In the dead of night, the California Legislature shelved legislation that would have protected every Internet user in the state from having their data collected and sold by ISPs without their permission. By failing to pass A.B. 375, the legislature demonstrated that they put the profits of Verizon...
Right before Congress left for its annual summer vacation the Obama Administration endorsed the Senate Intelligence Committee's Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). EFF opposes the bill because its vague definitions, broad legal immunity, and new spying powers allow for a tremendous amount...
A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.
I’ve been researching for this post for quite a while and of necessity it’s going to be my longest post. Ilya Starinov is arguably the most important person in the history of IEDs and in…
Today the University of California expands the reach of its research publications by issuing a Presidential Open Access Policy, allowing future scholarly articles authored by all UC employees to be freely shared with readers worldwide. Building on UC’s previously-adopted Academic Senate open access (OA) policies, this…
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