Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 318 posts.

Society, Policy & Culture
65

AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

For 3 years AdNauseam has been used by tens of thousands of Chrome, Firefox and Opera users, who oppose the unethical surveillance advertising model. Now Google banned it from its Web Store on very dubious charges. Furthermore Google locked AdNauseam users out of their ad data. Today it's your privacy tool, tomorrow…

69

Saved by Alice

In Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court ruled that an abstract idea does not become eligible for a patent simply by being implemented on a generic computer. This 2014 decision has significantly reduced the harm caused by vague and overbroad software patents. Before Alice, patent owners who had...