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In Memoriam: Ian Murdock
Docker is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, a 12-company reference architecture for securing AI agents, built around four governance questions.
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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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New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
The HN team members are some of the most thoughtful people about online communities I’ve ever met. So I’m always excited when they have a new idea to try. This idea is simple. We’re updating the guidelines to add: “Avoid gratuitous negativity.” Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds…
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Be Kind
Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them.
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I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10
Adventures in diy, electronics, programming, remote control and anything else.
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Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona
It was on the news this mroing, Mozilla will stop developing FirefoxOS phones , and the top Hacker News comment really resonated with me. Sure, IoT is the future, and it would be great if we had more nifty stuff there ( shameless IoT privacy plug ), but these headlines make the bad taste that I’ve had in my mouth ever…
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We are under attack
Fighting censorship with technology since 2011. We use AI to monitor censorship and expand free speech worldwide.
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Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
Personal website of Dr. Alexander Coward — mathematician, educator, and entrepreneur. Formerly at UC Berkeley, Oxford, UC Davis, and The University of Sydney.
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A Decade-Old Gag Order, Lifted
More than a decade ago, a man named Nick Merrill approached the NYCLU and ACLU with an unusual request for help. At the time, Nick ran a small Internet access and consulting business, called Calyx, in New York City.
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Britons: You Have 72 Hours to Stop the Snooper's Charter
Update: You did it! After a forceful debate on Monday 26 January, in which many peers protested the introduction of these amendments, Lord Blair withdrew them from consideration. Directly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, we cautioned the public and politicians to be "wary of any attempt to rush...
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Two HN Announcements
The HN community feels like it owns HN, and we like it that way. HN has become an important institution in the tech community, and though it was initially developed for YC founders it’s clearly evolved into much more than that. We’ve always felt that the best way for HN to benefit YC is simply for it to maximally…
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EFF’s Game Plan for Ending Global Mass Surveillance
We have a problem when it comes to stopping mass surveillance. The entity that’s conducting the most extreme and far-reaching surveillance against most of the world’s communications—the National Security Agency—is bound by United States law. That’s good news for Americans. U.S. law and the...
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My Livecoding.tv account deletion saga
Update 3, Nov 2 2015 (PM): Well, it’s been…strange. First, it seems my account was finally deleted by Livecoding.tv (thank you!) After being up all night with libel posted all over it, hours after Jamie Green (the other Livecoding co-founder) and Sam Altman (Y Combinator president) replied to the Hacker News thread…
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The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared
Today's release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions...
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VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation
Software Freedom Conservancy announces today Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. This is the regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig and Conservancy's ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly with the terms of the GNU General Public…
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If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear
Since 1851 Amsterdam had a registry that recorded the following innocent pieces of data about the residents: Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death if deceased. For many years this system served well and was kept meticulously up to date.
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“Citizenfour” Awarded Oscar for Best Documentary in 2014
CITIZENFOUR, Laura Poitras' riveting documentary about Edward Snowden's efforts to shed light on gross surveillance abuses by the United States government and its partners, just won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Tonight's Oscar win recognizes not only the incredible...
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Researchers Could Have Uncovered Volkswagen’s Emissions Cheat If Not for DMCA
Automakers argue that it’s unlawful for independent researchers to look at the code that controls vehicles without the manufacturer’s permission. We’ve explained before how this allows manufacturers to prevent competition in the markets for add-on technologies and repair tools. It also makes it harder for watchdogs to…
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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002
What did people's desktops look like?
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It's Time to Break Up the NSA (2014)
The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission—protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies—has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era. Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the…
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Internet.org Is Not Neutral, Not Secure, and Not the Internet
Facebook's Internet.org project, which offers people from developing countries free mobile access to selected websites, has been pitched as a philanthropic initiative to connect two thirds of the world who don’t yet have Internet access. We completely agree that the global digital divide should be...
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How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few representative…
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A Designer's War on Misleading Parking Signs
The story of a girl who got too many parking tickets, and dared to dream of a better tomorrow.
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