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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.
Audible even over the squeal of an HVAC blower with a suffering belt, the whine of small, high velocity fans pervades the grocery side of this Walgreens. Were they always this loud? I'm not sure; some of the fans sound distinctly unhealthy. Still, it's a familiar kind of noise to anyone who regularly works around…
Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle by Jennifer Jenkins, Director, Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain On January 1, 2024, after almost a century of copyright protection, Mickey Mouse, or at least a version of Mickey Mouse, will enter the United States public domain. The first…
Yesterday, TechFreedom sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee raising concerns about the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2023 (EARN IT Act). As it did when introduced in each of the past two sessions of Congress, the EARN IT Act undermines the privacy, security, and…
For thousands of years, a hidden rule limited the size of empires, unbeknownst to their rulers.
GENEVA (29 August 2023) – Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly engaged by organised criminal gangs into online criminality in Southeast Asia - from romance-investment scams and crypto fraud to illegal gambling - a report issued today by the UN Human Rights Office shows.
Element is one of 14 messaging apps blocked by the Central Indian Government which - we believe from media reports - relates to Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
Research published yesterday by several European media outlets has revealed that an international campaign in support of the EU's proposed child sexual abuse regulation has been largely orchestrated and financed by a network of organisations with links to the tech industry and security services. The
We did an analysis of the Google antitrust trial. Last week, over half of the trial was held behind closed doors because the judge, Amit Mehta, is deferring to Google on the need for secrecy.
Firefox version 115.0 was released on July 4, but I'm not celebrating. I'm concerned about a new "feature" in the release notes .
My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation : it's a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me – because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
The case for giving programmers private offices with doors — why open offices destroy deep work, how interruptions cost far more than floor space, and what the research actually says.
EARN IT Act is aiming at scanning our messages and photos, we are calling of Senators to oppose this surveillance bill!
At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what “good” business…
Legal Twitter is having tremendous fun right now reviewing the latest documents from the case Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (1:22-cv-01461). Here’s a neat summary: So, wait. They file a brief …
A very rough statistical analysis of a casino trick used by games on your phone (n=28).
Tutanota: We will not 'walk out' of UK like Signal. Nor will we comply with any request to bypass our encryption.
The FBI doesn’t believe that either our rights or the limitations that Congress has placed upon them matter when it comes to the vast amount of information about us collected under FISA Section 702. The latest exhibit in this is in yet another newly declassified opinion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court…
I’ve never trusted Facebook, mostly because I’ve been around tech for a long time and everything I’ve ever learned about the company looked like a red flag. But once I started to really dig in, what I learned was so much gnarlier and grosser and more devastating than what I’d assumed.
Space-based phone location-tracking firm HawkEye 360 announced its partnership with U.S. weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin this morning. The UAE military is allegedly a "strong" customer.
Over 30 years ago the late Ian Murdock wrote to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup about the completion of a brand-new Linux release which he named "The Debian Linux Release". He built the release by hand, from scratch, so to speak. Ian...
The goal was equity. The result: Meh.Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for…
Several people have opined on the recent announcement of Red Hat to change their terms of sales for their software. Here are some thoughts from Jon "maddog" Hall on it.
Please don't roll your big bags around town
A statement jointly signed by a historic coalition of experts: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
We have observed some confusion about the Internet Archive’s removal of links to a BBC documentary about Indian PM Narendra Modi ("India: the Modi Question"). Internet Archive can confirm that it has removed links in response to DMCA takedown requests from the BBC.
There are at least two kinds of catastrophe scenarios, and both are getting more plausible
