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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 663 posts.
This is our last chance to save critical online privacy protections. Take part in the action! We are one vote away from a world where your ISP can track your every move online and sell that information to the highest bidder. Call your lawmakers now and tell them to protect federal online privacy...
I. Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I’d previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some ar…
When sophisticated adversaries want to hack a network, they ultimately win. A government mandated encryption backdoor would make Americans less safe.
Call congress now! Back in 2014 over 3 million Internet users told the U.S. government loudly and clearly: we value our online security, we value our online privacy, and we value net neutrality. Our voices helped convince the FCC to enact smart net neutrality regulations—including long-needed...
Uber is what you get when you take Silicon Valley’s most toxic values, add billions of dollars in venture capital, and spice it with…
For several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS format. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to queue up and serve content from the internet. The MacSparky RSS, for example, gives RSS applications a list of all the articles I post here since you last checked int. It... Continue reading →
The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.
For 3 years AdNauseam has been used by tens of thousands of Chrome, Firefox and Opera users, who oppose the unethical surveillance advertising model. Now Google banned it from its Web Store on very dubious charges. Furthermore Google locked AdNauseam users out of their ad data. Today it's your privacy tool, tomorrow…
At DuckDuckGo, our vision is to raise the standard of trust online. For the 7th year we're making donations to organizations that share a similar vision.
I am old enough to remember the gogo days of cable TV when entrepreneurs who wanted to launch a new cable channel would go, hat in hand and cap table in tow, to the big cable companies and beg to get distribution on their networks. When the Internet came along in the early 90s, we […]
I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want…
If you’re reading this page it means that you are accessing a ‘darknet’ web page. Darknets used to refer to places where illicit drugs and pornography were traded, these days it refers to lonely servers without any inbound links languishing away in dusty server rooms that people have all but forgotten about. Refusing…
No, it's not rampant abuse, weak leadership, or a product that intimidates new users. The roots of Twitter's stagnation go back to 2010.
A few months ago, I took a leave of absence from Google to do a stint with the US Digital Service. A lot of people know about the US Digital Service because they helped rescue the healthcare.gov we…
She was discouraged, she was given an excuse to quit. Nevertheless, she coded.
In Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court ruled that an abstract idea does not become eligible for a patent simply by being implemented on a generic computer. This 2014 decision has significantly reduced the harm caused by vague and overbroad software patents. Before Alice, patent owners who had...
Facebook is acquiring tbh, another burgeoning social network; regulators erred in allowing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, but there is no better place to start enforcing the law than now.
The Free Software Foundation Europe and a broad group of organisations including Creative Commons are supporting the Public Money, Public Code campaign. The initiative calls for the adoption of policies that require that software paid for by the public be made broadly available as Free and Open Source Software. Nearly…
