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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 580 posts.
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Google Deceptively Tracks Students’ Internet Browsing, EFF Says in FTC Complaint
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Google for collecting and data mining school children’s personal information, including their Internet searches—a practice EFF uncovered while researching its “Spying on...
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Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OS X
I’ve been sitting on this information for some time, waiting to get more research done before I publish a post. But since word has come out about how Lenovo preloads what amounts to very bad spyware on their PCs, I thought I should also just go right ahead to spill the beans on the Mac.
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We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
The public sector is often seen as sclerotic and conservative in contrast with a dynamic and innovative private sector. This assumption lies at the basis of much of the outsourcing of public services to the private sector. In this interview and her new book, Mariana Mazzucato argues against this assessment and in…
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Nóirín Plunkett has died
It is with great sadness that the Foundation and its members were notified about the sudden passing of Nóirín Plunkett.
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Quadratic Voting (2014)
Glen Weyl has uploaded a new version of his paper, Quadratic Voting (written with Steven Lalley), to SSRN, which now includes the completed proofs. Quadratic voting is the most important idea for l…
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EFF, CloudFlare Asks Court Not to Force the Internet to Enforce Trademarks
This month, CloudFlare and EFF pushed back against major music labels’ latest strategy to force Internet infrastructure companies like CloudFlare to become trademark and copyright enforcers, by challenging a broad court order that the labels obtained in secret. Unfortunately, the court denied...
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EFF Outlines Plan to Fix the Broken Patent System
San Francisco - The U.S. patent system is in crisis, but there are clear steps Congress and the White House can take to mitigate the impact of vague patents, patent trolls, and a weak legal process to protect competition and creativity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explains in a new...
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EFF Files FOIA Suit Over U.S. Marshals’ Cell-Tracking Spy Planes
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to shine light on the U.S. Marshals Service's (USMS) use of small aircraft mounted with controversial cell-phone tracking systems. The Wall Street Journal revealed last year that the...
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Why the sun is a poor dumping ground for nuclear waste (2010)
A physicist explains why the sun is a poor dumping ground for nuclear waste.
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The Cult of Work You Never Meant to Join
Are our most valuable qualities being exploited at work? How our strengths get twisted into forming bad habits that just might kill us.
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Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go from Here
The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by...
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The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
“The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can’t possibly go wrong is that when something that can’t possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.” –Douglas Adams
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Snowden Meets the IETF
Last night, we had a screening of CITIZENFOUR at the IETF meeting in Prague, and about 170 people showed up to see the movie about Edward Snowden’s relevations — information that led the IETF to declare such pervasive monitoring as an attack on the Internet itself.
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The Electric Car
The electric car is going to take over the world. Soon. Let me explain. 75% of US consumers and over 85% of US millennials own smartphones. Perhaps more amazing is that 1/4 of people in the...
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Obama Encryption Policy Rejects Laws Mandating Backdoors
Obama’s position on encryption is now public, as reported by the Washington Post. According to Ellen Nakashima and Andrea Peterson of the Post, Obama “will not —for now—call for legislation requiring companies to decode messages for law enforcement.” Instead, the Post reports, the “administration...
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What a graph of 8,000 fake Twitter accounts looks like
Recently I've been plagued with Tweets saying that I'm "trending in London." As flattering as that is, it's not true. There appears to be a network of Twitter bots which are randomly repeating other people's tweets, ripping off avatars and bios, and generally causing a nuisance. Looking at the users' Twitter name, I…
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If David Cameron bans secure encryption he can't intercept
8:30 : Wake up and get out of bed. Open the curtains to see the sun shining, put a dressing gown on and go downstairs to make some coffee.
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FBI doesnt want you to know it uses NSLs to correlate identities you use online
Back in March, I parsed the declaration Nicholas Merrill submitted in his bid to reveal the contents of what he was asked to turn over via an NSL back in 2004. As a reminder, here’s what FBI permitted Merrill to reveal at the beginning of this suit. And here’s Merrill’s description of what kind of […]
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EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection
San Francisco - People have a Fourth Amendment right to privacy when it comes to their genetic material, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues in an amicus brief filed this week with the Supreme Court of the United States. EFF is asking the Supreme Court to hear arguments in Raynor v....
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