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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,050 posts.
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The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've used
This month marks the publication of "The Actual Star," a new, wildly ambitious, wildly successful novel by Monica Byrne, spanning 3,000 years of history from the ancient Maya to a distant future.
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Apple's plan to “think different” about encryption opens a backdoor to your life
Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system.
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Just Be Rich
No one wants to be the bad guy. When narratives begin to shift and the once good guys are labelled as bad it's not surprising they fight back. They'll point to criticisms as exaggerations. Their faults as misunderstandings. Today's freshly ordained bad guys are the investors and
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GitHub is fully available in Iran
All developers should be free to use GitHub, no matter where they live. At the same time, GitHub respects and abides by US law, which means government sanctions have limited our ability to provide developers in some countries the full range of GitHub services.
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It Can Happen to You
A few days ago, a fascinating article about Grand Theft Auto Online made the rounds of the tech news ecosystem.
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Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
TL;DR: Ethereum will use at least ~99.95% less energy post merge. Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which...
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Welcome to Libera Chat
A warm welcome to a new IRC network!
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Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
Supposedly today we have a lot of browsers to choose from - Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. Having choices is a good thing, right? Nobody wants to relive the time of almost complete Internet Explorer domination again. Unfortunately our choices are significantly fewer than…
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Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
Signal still knows nothing about you, but inexplicably the government continues to ask.
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Reddit’s disrespectful design
An overview of Reddit's adversarial and seemingly counter-productive changes.
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Delays aren’t good enough – Apple must abandon its surveillance plans
Apple announced today that it would “take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements” to a program that will weaken privacy and security on iPhones and other products. EFF is pleased Apple is now listening to the concerns of customers, researchers, civil liberties...
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Instagram ads Facebook won't show you
Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives. This isn’t exactly a secret, but the full picture is hazy to most – dim...
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Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet
Today at 1651 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled "Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL" because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.
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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory , David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status quo. The book cites ample anecdotal evidence that people perceive their own jobs as completely…
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Are Xiaomi browsers spyware? Yes, they are (2020)
Xiaomi browsers collect not merely your browsing history but also searches, downloads, YouTube videos watched and much more.
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Hundreds of fishing vessels vanishing along Argentina’s waters
An Oceana analysis found hundreds of foreign fishing vessels, primarily Chinese, pillaging the waters off Argentina.
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I refused to become an FBI informant, the government put me on the no fly list
With the help of the ACLU, I’m bringing a lawsuit to challenge the government’s actions.
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Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal
Just over a week ago, we announced that Iranian censors had started blocking all Signal traffic in the country. As an interim solution to help people in Iran get connected again, we’ve added support in Signal for a simple TLS proxy that is easy to set up, can be used to bypass the network block, ...
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Media blackout after key witness against Assange admits lying
As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission . Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.
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Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany
Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany. Big push for other national Demoscene applications and the acceptance for an understanding of digital cultures in general
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NYT journalist hacked with Pegasus after reporting on previous hacking attempts
Our forensic analysis of two iPhones belonging to Hubbard found evidence of Pegasus infections in July 2020 and June 2021. Notably, these infections occurred after Hubbard reported in January 2020 that we found that he was targeted in 2018 by the Saudi Arabia-linked Pegasus operator that we call KINGDOM.
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How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
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On Apple’s “Expanded Protections for Children” – A Personal Story
These efforts will evolve and expand over time. – Apple on their “Expanded Protections for Children” I am broke “non-liquid” right now. Normally, that sentence doesn&#…
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Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossibl