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Mozilla Presses Pause on Facebook Advertising
Mozilla is pressing pause on our Facebook advertising. Facebook knows a great deal about their two billion users — perhaps more intimate information than
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 597 posts.
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The EU's Link Tax Will Kill Open Access and Creative Commons News
All this month, the European Union's "trilogue" is meeting behind closed doors to hammer out the final wording of the new Copyright Directive, a once-noncontroversial regulation that became a hotly contested matter when, at the last minute, a set of extremist copyright proposals were added and...
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Why the world needs OpenStreetMap (2014)
Every time I tell someone about OpenStreetMap, they inevitably ask "Why not use Google Maps?". From a practical standpoint, it's a reasonable question, but ultimately this is not just a matter of practicality, but of what kind of society we want to live in. I discussed this topic in a 2008 talk on OpenStreetMap I gave…
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A Developer’s Guide to Responding to National Security Letters
When the FBI Shows Up at Your Office with an NSL When you receive thousands of requests from law enforcement each year, it’s actually not a surprise wh
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Why I'm Ditching Android
I've been slowly de-Googling my life, so the next step is to get rid of Android, in favour of an iPhone.
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Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
Right now, any robocall hacker in the world can instantly take over your phone’s screen, knocking you out of your mobile gaming experience, disrupting you as you check out at the store, or breaking your concentration as you try and type out an email.
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Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
Eight years after Google initially took a stand against Internet censorship by exiting the Chinese search market, we are disappointed to learn the company has been secretly re-considering an extended collaboration with the massive censorship and surveillance-wielding state. According to an...
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Dude, you broke the future
Back to: PSA: Please don't nominate the Laundry Files for a Best Series Hugo Award (this year) | Forward to: New Book Week!
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The death of a TLD
Another one bites the dust. The gTLD gold rush is now seeing a steady flow of TLD’s that clearly just didnt work out.
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EU copyright proposal could undermine the use of Creative Commons licenses
Over the last few years the European Union has been working on revising its rules on copyright. But the latest proposal from the head of the copyright committee would deny creators the right to refuse remuneration — the right to share a work without getting paid — which could undermine the use of CC licenses…
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TSA’s Roadmap for Airport Surveillance Moves in a Dangerous Direction
The Transportation Security Administration has set out an alarming vision of pervasive biometric surveillance at airports, which cuts against the right to privacy, the “right to travel,” and the right to anonymous association with others.The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, which included language...
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Firefox removes RSS support
gHacks recently reported that Mozilla plans to remove support for RSS & Atom related features. Specifically Live Bookmarks and their feed reader.
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What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You
This blog post is a personal account of sexism, harassment, and racism that I and some anonymous members of the computer architecture community have experienced. We are sharing these experiences in…
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Statistics, Fast and Slow
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 13 April 2018. One way to understand China is to look at the statistics. Real income per person has increased nearly tenfold since 1990. Si…
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Stack Overflow Culture
This blog post was most directly provoked by this tweet from my friend Rob Conery, explaining why he’s giving up contributing on Stack Overflow. However, it’s been a long time coming. A…
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Blocked by JSConf.eu Twitter account
Some people are probably pretty used to various blocking endeavours on social media. I am not one of them…
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But Rich People Live Here, So We Can't Be Going Broke
If your growth strategy only works as long as wealthy people live in your town, your growth strategy is deeply fragile.
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Why the Luddites Matter
Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood, His feats I but little admire I will sing the achievements of General Ludd Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire – General Ludd’s Triumph, [1] C…
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Does Australia's access and assistance law impact 1Password?
Australia recently passed a law that correctly has people asking about the security and privacy of tools like 1Password.
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Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong
“Birth order” refers to whether a child is the oldest, second-oldest, youngest, etc. in their family. For a while, pop psychologists created a whole industry around telling people how t…
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Responsibility Deflected, the CLOUD Act Passes
UPDATE, March 23, 2018: President Donald Trump signed the $1.3 trillion government spending bill—which includes the CLOUD Act—into law Friday morning. “People deserve the right to a better process.”Those are the words of Jim McGovern, representative for Massachusetts and member of the House of...
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Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)
Why do some English plurals end in "en" instead of "s"?
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USA Temperature: can I sucker you?
Suppose I wanted to convince people that temperature in the USA wasn’t going up, it was going down. What would I show? Let’s try yearly average temperature in the conterminous U.S., als…
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We Regulate the Wrong Things
Most cities’ zoning and development regulations obsess over things that are easy to measure, like building height and density, at the expense of the things that actually determine whether we’re building quality places.
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