Best of 2011

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2011. 453 posts.

Society, Policy & Culture
371

Bitcoin is not decentralized

Bitcoin was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto, and the primary client is developed by a bunch of folks at bitcoin.org . Do you care who these people are? In theory, you shouldn’t: all they do is develop an open source client for an open source protocol. Anyone else can develop their own client (and some people have) and no…

389

EFF: Some Facts About Carrier IQ

There has been a rolling scandal about the Carrier IQ software installed by cell phone companies on 150 million phones, mostly within the United States. Subjects of outright disagreement have included the nature of the program, what information it actually collects, and under what circumstances....