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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.
Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do …
20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired . I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
The European Commission is currently in the process of enacting a law called Chat control. If the law goes into effect, it will mean that all EU citizens' communications will be monitored and listened to.
Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service providers and platforms, to upstream ISPs (sometimes...
Citizen Lab found an actively exploited zero-click vulnerability being used to deliver NSO Group’s Pegasus mercenary spyware while checking the device of an individual employed by a Washington DC-based civil society organization with international offices. We refer to the exploit chain as BLASTPASS. The exploit chain…
The U.S. Patent Office has proposed new rules about who can challenge wrongly granted patents. If the rules become official, they will offer new protections to patent trolls. Challenging patents will become far more onerous, and impossible for some. The new rules could stop organizations like EFF,...
In a free society, people should not have their private correspondence constantly examined. U.S. lawmakers, we would hope, understand that individuals have the right to a private conversation without the government looking over their shoulder. So it’s dismaying to see a group of U.S. Senators...
The PSF received three subpoenas from the US Department of Justice for PyPI user data in March and April of 2023.
As a longtime user of Windows, it was my first choice when preparing the first computer for my son. But that didn't work out as expected.
Journalists should stop saying that the evidence is just correlational
Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...
Microsoft knowingly released a broken product for short-term hype
With United States v. Smith (S.D.N.Y. May 11, 2023), a district court judge in New York made history by being the first court to rule that a warrant is required for a cell phone search at the border, “absent exigent circumstances” (although other district courts have wanted to do so).EFF is...
Digitec Galaxus is blazing a trail. The Swiss online retailer now displays how often customers return products, how often products break during the warranty period and how long it takes for a warranty claim to be settled. With that, Galaxus and Digitec now serve as a reference work for the product and service quality…
Cambridge University Press is publishing a textbook I have co-edited with five colleagues, Shaken Baby Syndrome, Investigating the Abusive Head Trauma Controversy, by Findley et al. With contributions by 32 authors, this book provides a thorough analysis of an interdisciplinary subject lying at the intersection of…
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In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired a market research firm to survey the public on what they wanted in a work of art. Across 11 countries they then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. Each piece was intended to be a unique a colla
Trying to see the world more clearly
What just happened on archive.org today, as best we know: Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon's AWS services. (Even by web standards,10’s of thousands of requests per second is a lot.) This activity brought archive.org down for all…
We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
When unreasonable requests are followed up with "but you could have just said no!" Exploring the clashes of ask culture and guess culture, at home and at work.
This article was written on the basis of information related to the so-called "8 December" case (see the footnotes for a global overview of the case, we focus on the "numerical part" of it in this article<fn>For a summary of the 8 December affair see in particular the testimonies available in thi
That’s a quote from Cindy Li — “We're all just temporarily abled”. I first heard it in Sara’s course and it’s been on repeat in my mind ever since June 6th…
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. Alex Tabarrok writes about how “when the FDA fails to approve a good drug, people die but the bo…
The common pattern of trying to delete yourself.
Old law proposes to turn the Bay Area's zoning system into something like Japan's in just two days.
Read about the demoscene joining the Dutch national intangible cultural heritage inventory, with links to the entry and safeguarding plan.
