2521
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
2522
Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions
In-flight messaging I was on a Delta flight the other day, and I was thinking about how they offer free messaging from your smartphone. How do they limit the wifi? Maybe they have some basic filter that says “deny everything except the urls for these 3 messaging apps”, which makes sense conceptually. What if we don’t…
2523
Mark Felt-Tipped: Uncovering top-secret information by counting pixels
KEMUDITOTO merupakan official Situs Togel 4D & Toto TOGEL ONLINE Terjamin Maxwin dengan akses cepat, pilihan permainan lengkap, layanan responsif, dan nyaman digunakan setiap hari.
2524
2525
Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’
It’s not just that Isaacson was wrong about *something*; it’s that he was wrong about the most important thing in Jobs’s career. There’s a decades-long story arc about the software system started at NeXT that Isaacson completely misses.
2526
Mickey, Disney, and the public domain: A 95-year love triangle
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…
2527
Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
I reverse-engineered Waffle House's website to build a live version of the (unofficial) Waffle House Index, and got a cease and desist for it.
2528
Using Silk Road
History, background, visiting, ordering, using, & analyzing the drug market Silk Road 1
2529
Bose founder, Amar Bose, has died at 83
Entrepreneur served on faculty for 45 years; championed long-term corporate research.
2530
Google Broke Image Search for Creative Commons
Except me. As of one minute ago I confirmed what I noticed last Wednesday. According to the all seeing Google, on the entire world wide web there are but three Creative Commons licensed images of a…
2531
2532
Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards
AWM #91: I wanted to clarify the tech work landscape for myself and instead I wrote this (??) 🪞
2533
DHS asks Mozilla to take down MafiaaFire add-on
From time to time, we receive government requests for information, usually market information and occasionally subpoenas. Recently the US Department of Homeland Security contacted Mozilla and reque…
2534
Czech republic sets IPv4 end date
On 17 January 2024, the Government of the Czech Republic approved the material "Restarting the implementation of DNSSEC and IPv6 technologies in the state administration". On the basis of this decision, the Czech state administration will stop providing its services over IPv4 on 6 June 2032. Thus, the Czech Republic…
2535
The NSA: An Inside View
In which I relate my experience as an NSA employee and impart my thoughts on the policies in place, my former coworkers, and the current cyber war.
2536
2537
North Carolina teacher's resignation letter
A letter from a disgusted teacher: I QUIT Kris L. Nielsen Monroe, NC 28110 Union County Public Schools Human Resources Department 400 North Church Street Monroe, NC 28112 October 25, 2012 To All it…
2538
I have a lot to say about Signal’s Cellebrite hack
This blog post is based off of a talk I gave on May 12, 2021 at the Stanford Computer Science Department’s weekly lunch talk series on computer security topics. Full disclosure: I’ve done some consulting work for Signal, albeit not on anything like this issue. (I kinda doubt
2539
CatalanGate: Spyware operation against Catalans using Pegasus and Candiru
The Citizen Lab, in collaboration with Catalan civil society groups, has identified at least 65 individuals targeted or infected with mercenary spyware, including members of the European Parliament, Catalan Presidents, legislators, jurists, and members of civil society organisations.
2540
2541
After Facebook fails
Making the rounds is The Facebook Fallacy, a killer essay by Michael Wolff in MIT Technology Review. The gist: At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our ti…
2542
2543
2544
Asking Microsoft to resign from the RIAA over YouTube-dl takedown demand
We learned on Friday that GitHub removed youtube-dl's primary collaboration forum and code repository from their site, which had been hosted at https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl. The action was in response to a DMCA Section 512 notice that the RIAA sent demanding removal of youtube-dl, which was released and…
2545
Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose
It's official: the last holdout for the open web has fallen. Flanked on all sides by Google, Microsoft, Opera, and (it appears) Safari's support and promotion of the EME DRM-in-HTML standard, Mozilla is giving in to pressure from Hollywood, Netflix, et al, and will be implementing its own third-...
2546
2547
2548
Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning
Estimates suggest that around every third child in the world suffers from lead poisoning. What can we do to reduce this?
2549
Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog
Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal b…
2550
IPhone vs Android? No. We're fighting the wrong fight
We have been distracted by ridiculous arguments and fabricated “wars” for too long. We have been distracted by thinking that Google is Microsoft and Apple is Apple in a doomed fight alr…