Actually eat healthily for £1 per day
Last week, I stumbled across a BBC News article entitled How to eat healthily on £1 a day via a story on hacker news . Healthy eating on a budget is something I’m really interested in, but I was horribly disappointed by the article, because i) it didn’t show you how to eat healthily, and ii) it didn’t show you how to…
How to solve the problem that the topmost comments get all upvotes
[[Update: As of August 2015, I have partly implemented the approach in the first example below (but not the second example). ]]
Facebook reveals friends list even when it’s set to private
The Sophos Blog
Microsoft's dystopian pitch for remote work
Microsoft is launching a new marketing campaign for Office 365 that celebrates working during your kid’s recitals, on vacation, and while enjoying the appetizer at a restaurant. All this under the guise of “balance” between work and life. Yes, it’s horrible. Remote w…
MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case
Professors Hal Abelson and Peter Diamond complete review.
FISA Court Rejects Catch-22 Secrecy Argument in FOIA Case
In the first publicly known victory by a non-government party before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the secret court today granted a motion filed by EFF related to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The FISC gave its OK to the public disclosure of an earlier opinion...
Help Fight Patent Trolls – Support the SHIELD Act
This week brings promising news in the fight against patent trolls. We have written before about how a broken patent system has led to an explosion of lawsuits by patent trolls (companies that assert patents as a business model instead of creating products). In the hands of trolls, patents become a...
How airline reservations are used to target illegal searches
One of the most detailed pictures to date of how the US government uses airline reservations to target illegal searches is provided by documents released recently by the US government as part of an agreement to settle a lawsuit brought by David House , an activist with the Pvt. Manning Support Network .
Email transparency
Many people have asked about how this email openness actually works. Is it really the case all our mail is copied to a list? If so, how do we avoid drowning in email?
EFF Politely Asks PTO to Stop Issuing So Many Crappy Software Patents
Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued countless bad software patents. These patents tend to be hopelessly vague and overbroad. Indeed, they are often so packed with indecipherable patent jargon that software engineers have trouble understanding them. As one programmer...
Civil Liberties Groups Speak Out Against CISPA in Lead Up to Hearings
On Monday, EFF and over 30 other Internet rights organizations sent a letter to members of Congress demanding they vote no on the "cybersecurity" bill known as CISPA. The letter starts off a week in which Congress will hold three different hearings about CISPA and computer and network security. In...
The IIT Entrance Exam
This is the story of India's Joint Entrance Examination, the yearly attempt to pick out the ten thousand most intelligent students in a country of 1.2 billion people.
Let’s help Airbnb rebuild the bridge it just burned
[Trieste, Italy, 12:02am Friday 21 May 2013 — As I say in the comments here, Airbnb has responded to this post, explaining that a bug in the system was involved. While that might patch Airbnb’…
Teenager Who Reads News Online? According to the DoJ, You May Be a Criminal
During his first term, President Barack Obama declared October 2009 to be “National Information Literacy Awareness Month,” emphasizing that, for students, learning to navigate the online world is as important a skill as reading, writing and arithmetic. It was a move that echoed his predecessor's...
Welcome to Echelon 2.0
The NSA isn't spying on you. They don't have to. They just outsource it to businesses. Back 20 years ago, there was a conspiracy theory ...
Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware
National rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big differences by decade: Violence…