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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage. PLUS: 10,000 drivers call on Uber to repay stolen wages, a man is arrested at a public hearing about a data center and more.
An open letter from the technology industry, and the launch of Akrites - a coordinated effort to remediate vulnerabilities in the open source software the world runs on.
Personal blog of Stephen Diehl - Software engineer writing about technology, programming, and the future
In the past few months the MetaBrainz team has been fighting a battle against unscrupulous AI companies ignoring common courtesies (such as robots.txt) and scraping the Internet in order to build up their AI models . Rather than downloading our dataset in one complete download, they insist on loading all of…
AndreGarzia.com website
Open Letter to Google Regarding Mandatory Developer Registration for Third-Party App Distribution
I’m coming down from spending a few days at Usenix Security, right here in my hometown of Baltimore. This means that my days have been taken up with two kinds of conversation: first, explaini…
A more circular economy is not only important for the environment. It can also strengthen consumer rights and improve societal resilience. In this report, we show how consumer policy can make circular choices easier, safer and more attractive for consumers.
A bungled Assetnote scan
Nothing on the internet lasts forever. But Disney’s 10-year mismanagement of FiveThirtyEight is its own story.
This case involves Apple’s handling of user-uploaded files hosted in private iCloud storage. Instead of adopting PhotoDNA to scan hosted files for CSAM, Apple created its own proprietary alternative, NeuralHash, which apparently wasn’t as good. So Apple U-turned on its...
Imagine, just for a moment, that the Government wanted to keep a record of everyone's sexuality. They need to know this detailed demographic data because it will be highly useful in civic planning. It will help them work out what provision needs to be made for sexual health services, how many children are likely to be…
In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all…
Lawyers should be able to read a statute as it stood on any date and see which law wrote each phrase. A history of nine titles of the US Code, built by replaying every amendment, as the example.
I found a stranger texting my 12-year-old on a 'kid-safe' Gabb phone. Parental controls are broken.
How earbuds influence our beliefs and push us apart.
Agents can write code faster than we can absorb it. Here's why it still matters for humans to understand what they build — and some techniques for doing that efficiently: explainer docs, quizzes, micro-worlds, and shared spaces.
"Internal ICE material and testimony from an official obtained by 404 Media provides the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activities on the ground."
I came across a GH thread related to chess engine development that made me think of why hobby programming communities are increasingly hostile toward LLM development. While the thread doesn’t give a lot of insight into answering the question, it prompted me to think about it a bit. I’ve seen similar sentiments…
All internet voting systems are insecure. The insecurity is worse than a well-run conventional paper ballot system, because a very small number of people may have the power to change any (or all) votes that go through the system, without detection.
Search was 49.7% of Alphabet's revenue in Q3 2026, down from 62% in early 2019, as Google Cloud grew much faster. Every quarter since 2018, from Alphabet's earnings releases.
Apple is letting users build their own Wallet passes in iOS 27. After 14 years of PassKit, the supply-side problem is finally being solved from the demand side.
Loops, harnesses, and why even loop skeptics may end up with them.
The news isn’t getting preserved in the Wayback Machine anymore because major media outlets are blocking it.
Somewhat devastating news today from CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they decided …
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James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages
We found that former Member of the European Parliament Stelios Kouloglou was hacked with Pegasus spyware while serving on the PEGA committee, which investigated Pegasus and other spyware abuses in Europe. Through forensic analysis of his device, we found that the attackers could have had access to confidential…
