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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 695 posts.
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Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
This post is the first in series on the militarization of policing. Check back this week from more from Radley Balko .
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UK Authorities Destroy Guardian's Hard Drives
Fresh off the news that UK authorities detained the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald for nine hours yesterday, Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger has published an extraordinary report of government pressure and intimidation that should send chills down the spine of anyone who cares about a free…
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German Parliament says: Stop Granting Software Patents
The German Parliament, the Bundestag, has introduced a joint motion against software patents. The resolution urges the German government to take steps to l...
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The Constitution Applies When the Government Bans Americans From the Skies
The government does not have the unchecked authority to place individuals on a secret blacklist without providing them any meaningful opportunity to object, the ACLU argued in a brief filed last Friday with the federal district court in Oregon.
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Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format
I've recently completed a project to compile publicly-available NFL play-by-play data. It took a while, but now it's ready. The resulting ...
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My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved
We used to have a fight about how much the internet would grieve if he died. I was right, but the last word you get in as the still living is a hollow thing, trailing off, as it does, into oblivion. I love Aaron. I loved Aaron. There are no words to can contain love, to cloth it in words is to kill it, to mummify it…
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Bradley Manning's Post-Sentencing Statement
This statement from Bradley Manning was read after hos 35-year sentence was passed by his lawyer, David Coombs. The decisions that I mad...
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Civil Liberties Groups and Internet Companies Demand an End to NSA Spying
UPDATE (1/15/14): Computing Using Educators, Inc, has added its name to the list. This brings the total to 87. Today, a bipartisan coalition of 86 civil liberties organizations and Internet companies – including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reddit, Mozilla, FreedomWorks, and the American...
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I conceal my identity the same way Aaron was indicted for
According to his indictment , Aaron Swartz was charged with wirefraud for concealing/changing his "true identity". It sent chills down my ba...
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As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption
With further confirmation of the longstanding rumor that the U.S. government (and, we can safely assume, other governments around the world) have been pressuring major Internet firms to provide their "master" SSL keys for government surveillance purposes, we are rapidly approaching a critical technological crossroad.
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I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
Just before black friday I was surfing some major retailers sites and on a whim wanted to see how they were using jav...
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Read less HN
< Random thoughts of John Murray
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Lying Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft put up an ad: Windows vs. iPad: Compare tablets - Microsoft Windows. It shows the iPad screen (left) compared with the ASUS VivoTab Smart screen (right). This is not to scale. Microsoft has d
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H5N1
Most of the time, we worry far too much about tail risk. We worry about terrorist attacks and necrotizing fasciitis, but not much about heart disease or car crashes. But in 2011, 17 US citizens...
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EFF: "Parallel construction" is really intelligence laundering
UPDATE: Add the IRS to the list of federal agencies obtaining information from NSA surveillance. Reuters reports that the IRS got intelligence tips from DEA's secret unit (SOD) and were also told to cover up the source of that information by coming up with their own independent leads to recreate...
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Exhibit A – the “child pornographer”
This blog seeks to expose some of the myths about our present criminal justice system, myths that have risen to prominence again following publication of the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) consultation …
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Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the…
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Don't trust me: I might be a spook
But the latest revelations scare me. It's one thing to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software; there's a lot of software out there which was written by developers with very little understanding of cryptography or software security, and it shows. If you care about security, we reasoned, stick to software written…