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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 663 posts.
I wrote this in 2012, when CloudFlare (an almost awkwardly popular CDN) introduced a bug into websites they hosted using some of their "advanced features" via injected JavaScript that managed to not just break the website but lock up entire web browers by tickling a scheduler starvation bug in WebCore. This issue was…
The Wikimedia Foundation’s mission is to support the communities of readers and contributors who share and consume information on Wikipedia and the other free-knowledge projects. Privacy and anonym…
It was free!” announces Bob the Dinosaur, an adorable moron from the Dilbert cartoon. Bob is driving a bright red convertible. “They just make you sign papers!”, he elaborates. That cartoon is a qu…
You can find anything and everything on the internet, yet nothing that explains how to track cell phones. Let us clarify right away, we are not talking about how to track your own cell phone in cas…
The “PreCheck” program is billed as a convenient service to allow U.S. travelers to “speed through security” at airports. However, the latest proposal released by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reveals the Department of Homeland Security’s greater underlying plan to collect face...
The nation has spoken: weird pointless $400 wi-fi enabled juicer company Juicero is the perfect symbol of Silicon Valley. So says the Washington Post: Juicero Shows What’s Wrong With Silicon …
Welcome back to the annual State of Clojure survey results. This year we held steady in our response rate as 2,420 of you took the time and effort to weigh in on your experience with Clojure - as always, we appreciate that time and effort very much. And, as always, thanks to Chas Emerick for starting this survey 7…
There have been several articles in the press recently about users flocking to DuckDuckGo in the wake of the recent NSA snooping revel...
At EFF, we've become all too accustomed to bad news on copyright coming out of Europe, so it's refreshing to hear that Portugal has recently passed a law on copyright that helps to strike a fairer balance between users and copyright holders on DRM. The law doesn't abolish legal protection for DRM...
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Years of lobbying and litigation has made it clear Comcast wants to turn the Internet into a toll road and run the booth If you have signed onto Twitter and have been following the network neutrality debate, you've probably seen Comcast's campaign to rewrite its history of opposition to the Open...
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
How close are we to building the hosts?
Hey Instagram. I was just wondering,
On August 31, 2015, I started a Ph.D. in cryptography at TU Eindhoven, working with Tanja Lange and Dan Bernstein. On December 2, 2016, I…
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Yahoo Holdings and Oath filed a complaint against Mozilla on December 1, 2017, claiming that we improperly terminated the agreement between Mozilla and Yah
Have you missed me? Trick question; I know you’ve missed me. Frankly, the main reason I haven’t been writing is laziness. I make no bones about it. The second reason is that I got hit b…
The field of machine learning and artificial intelligence is making rapid progress. Many people are starting to ask what a world with intelligent computers will look like. But what is the ratio of hype to real progress? What kinds of problems have been well solved by current machine learning techniques, which ones are…
Vox, effectively a Comcast subsidiary, writes a glowing explainer on why Comcast’s $500 million investment is solid and has huge upside, on the same day as the investment.
Read Elliot Temple's essay about Taking Children Seriously.
There’s a new bill in Congress that would threaten your right to free expression online. If that weren’t enough, it could also put small Internet businesses in danger of catastrophic litigation. Don’t let its name fool you: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693) wouldn’t help punish...
In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is “dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism.” Subsequently...
Facebook is testing radically different Explore Feed in six countries than in the rest of the world.
