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Git for the US Code
Lawyers should be able to read a statute as it stood on any date and see which law wrote each phrase. A history of nine titles of the US Code, built by replaying every amendment, as the example.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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New study: The advertising industry is systematically breaking EU law
The online advertising industry is behind comprehensive illegal collection and indiscriminate use of personal data, research from the Norwegian Consumer Council shows.
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When it comes to privacy, default settings matter
What if I told you that on nearly every single website you visit, data about you was transmitted to dozens or even hundreds of companies, all so that the w
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Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)
Republished by Slate. Translations available in French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文) For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work corresponde…
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Web3 is centralized
I've long been interested in the decentralization of computing and communication in general, and of the web in particular. The trend of communication and information becoming more and more centralized in large corporations is worrying and worth fighting against, particularly from the perspective of systemic risk. I…
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Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
In order to be able to choose their own browser, people must be free to download it, easily set it to default and to continue using it - all without ...
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Don't believe ChatGPT – we do not offer a "phone lookup" service
TL;DR ChatGPT claims we offer an API to turn a mobile phone number into the location of the phone. We do not.
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Google: Open Letter to Australians
g.co/Australia-Letter
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NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur
The NYT's Taylor Lorenz falsely accuses a tech investor of using a slur after spending months trying to infiltrate and monitor a new app that allows free conversation.
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The myth of NASA's expensive space pens
There’s a story about NASA’s incredibly expensive space pen and Russia’s simpler solution that gets trotted out every time some large organization introduces so
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TSA: Fail
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was formed to ensure America’s freedom to travel. Instead, they have made air travel the ...
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Johns Hopkins Launches Center for Psychedelic Research
The center, believed to be the first and largest of its kind, will use psychedelics to study the mind, identify therapies for diseases such as addiction, PTSD, Alzheimer's
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In the Wake of Aaron Swartz's Death, Let's Fix Draconian Computer Crime Law
Outpourings of grief and calls for change continue to flood the Internet after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, only 26 years old. Aaron was one of our community's best and brightest, and he acheived great things in his short life. He was a coder, a political activist, an entrepreneur, a contributor to...
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Parental controls aren't for parents
I found a stranger texting my 12-year-old on a 'kid-safe' Gabb phone. Parental controls are broken.
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Early-Retirement Update
I’ve had a difficult time finding a way to create a new entry on a blog that has essentially been dead since 2015. Yet, I have had a persistent feeling that I owe my readers an update.
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Companies embracing SMS for account logins should be blamed for SIM-swap attacks
[UPDATE Since this was posted in 2024 : Major US telcos like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have suffered a months-long breach (the ongoing Salt Typhoon attack). These companies, of course, pass along the unencrypted SMSes vital to countless log in flows, account re-activations, and password resets. They are now known to…
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Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view
Apple has announced the new client-side content scanning (based on parameters received from the center) to find child sexual abuse materials to be reported to law enforcers.
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Wikimedia removes the Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law
Today, in an unfortunate example of the overreach of the United States’ current copyright law, the Wikimedia Foundation removed the Dutch-language text of The Diary of Anne Frank from Wikisou…
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Vine will be discontinuing the mobile app
Since 2013, millions of people have turned to Vine to laugh at loops and see creativity unfold. Today, we are sharing the news that in the…
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Belgium legalises ethical hacking
On 15 February 2023, Belgium saw the entering into force of a new ‘whistleblower’ law, which legalised ‘ethical hacking’ even for cases where the hacked entity did not consent to it. In order to benefit from such decriminalisation, the law poses a number of conditions for ethical hacking, that have to be fulfilled in…
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An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California
Update (April 27): Boaz Barak—Harvard CS professor, longtime friend-of-the-blog, and coauthor of my previous guest post on this topic—has just written an awesome FAQ, providing his pers…
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Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions
Diversity and inclusion are hard, especially in tech. Doing them right means agreeing on values, setting standards, calling out bad…
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Censored Photographs of FDR’s Japanese Concentration Camps
The military seized her photographs, quietly depositing them in the National Archives, where they remained mostly unseen and unpublished until 2006.
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I don’t like computers
AdamW on Linux and more