Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 658 posts.
We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research. We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would…
Today I filed a lawsuit against the US government, challenging Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 1201 means that you can be sued or prosecuted for accessing, speaking about, and tinkering with digital media and technologies that you have paid for. This violates our First Amendment rights…
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
We have a few updates we want to share on our Basic Income Project [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/basic-income]: Our Research Director Elizabeth Rhodes is joining Basic Income Project as our Research Director. She recently completed a joint PhD in Social Work and Political Science at the University of Michigan…
IFTTT will maintain Pinboard support through at least the end of 2016. While this date is not specified in their full statement , I have confirmed it with the CEO and am pleased to announce it here.
On 22 June 2016, Unicode version 9.0 was published . As part of that, 4 new symbols were introduced – and another one was re-purposed.
Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available When you pay for federally funded research, you should be allowed to read it. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (S.779, H.R.1477), which was just passed out of a major Senate committee. Under...
Update, 11/17 at 8pm: Google has reactivated the suspended accounts! Here is the message that they each received: "Hello Google user, Your Google Account
Ahmed Mansoor was targeted by NSO Group, an Israel-based “cyber war” company that sells Pegasus, a government-exclusive “lawful intercept” spyware product.
This visualization shows the top 30 books ranked by total number of links to Amazon in Hacker News comments from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015.
[Update (12/14/16): Reuters has specified that the rootkit was implemented as a Linux kernel module. Wow.]
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2016, at Web Camp Zagreb [ video ] (45 mins)
On a recent trip to Cuba I brought with me a smartphone and hoped to get Internet access either via WiFi or 3G. I managed that (at a price) but also saw for myself how Cubans get access to an alternate Internet delivered by sneakernet.
In the “first half of 2016” (the most specific we’re permitted to be), we received a subpoena from the Eastern District of Virginia. The subpoena required us to provide information about two Signal users for a federal grand jury investigation. We’ve designed the Signal service to minimize the dat...
Netflix is in terrible danger. In fact, these might be its last days. Oh, not today's Netflix. The Netflix you're using today is fine. It made it—got to do something daring and edgy, prove out its model, and become part of the establishment. But the next Netflix—the company so cool it makes...
When I was arrested in San Francisco, I ended up spending a night in prison naked, in solitary confinement. But, I have a dirty secret: it…
At the end of last week, the White House published a draft for a Source Code Policy (Update: the draft is not online anymore, link changed to final version). The policy requires every public agency to publish their custom-build software as Free Software for other public agencies as well as the ge...
