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EFF’s “Spying on Students” Report Highlights Tech Companies’ Data Collection
San Francisco—School children are being spied on by tech companies through devices and software used in classrooms that often collect and store kids’ names, birth dates, browsing histories, location data, and much more—often without adequate privacy protections or the awareness and consent of...
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How the NSA obtains and uses airline reservations (2013)
A front-page report in today’s New York Times based on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden confirms that the NSA, like the DHS, uses airline reservation data as part of its profiling and social network analysis of US citizens and foreigners. Today’s report also raises new questions, and suggests some…
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California updates laws around salary and criminal histories of job applicants
California has updated its labor laws around the salary and criminal histories of job applicants. Find out how to stay compliant.
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“Side Hustle” as a Sign of the Apocalypse
“Side hustle,” “mom-tech,” and “the sharing economy” are covering up something sinister
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O'Reilly's Decision and Its DRM Implication
On Wednesday, I got mail from Laura Baldwin, President of O'Reilly, announcing that "as of today, we are discontinuing fulfillment of indiv...
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Supreme Court Should Block Printer Company’s Ploy to Undermine Consumer Rights
San Francisco - When you buy a printer cartridge, is it yours? Or can the company control what you do with it, even after you pay your bill and take it home? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the U.S. Supreme Court today to protect consumers’ property rights in a court case centering...
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Interview with Ed McManus, Technical Advisor for HBO’s Silicon Valley [audio]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe iTunes [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/y-combinator/id1236907421] Google Play [https://play.google.com/music/m/I7pbd3gcjjeifbnm3wf7ag66ane?t=Y_Combinator] Stitcher [http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/y-combinator] RSS…
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Why our outdated brains are making us unhappy
Why your outdated brain is making you unhappy and how to hack it.
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Unexpected Consequences of Self-Driving Cars
Many new technologies have unexpected impacts on the physical or social world in which we live.
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Brief thoughts on the “Google memo”
(I wrote this in reference to this memo and the ensuing uproar) First off, his argument had some flaws. For example, even if he was correct about personality differences between men and women being…
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Dutch House of Representatives passes dragnet surveillance bill
On February 14, 2017 the bill for the new Intelligence and Security Services Act was passed by the Dutch lower house. Despite being met with serious opposition from experts, regulators, civil society, political parties and citizens, the revised bill passed virtually unchanged from the proposal submi
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Peer-to-peer social networking with Rotonde and Beaker
A short introduction to p2p social networking with Rotonde & Beaker Browser.
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How Fact-Free Parenting Policies Rob Kids' Independence
I've been teaching my oldest kids (ages 7, 8, 9 and 11, as I write this) how to take the city bus to and from their school for the last two years. It's gone unequivocally well, with the kids slowly progressing from riding with me for the entire trip, to…
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Net Neutrality will die, so let’s take the profit out of killing it
Fighting the FCC is futile at this point, but Bob has a way to (in a way) save Net Neutrality
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Base-4 fractions in Telugu
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Google and Paint.NET need to stop misleading users (2013)
The Paint.NET web site runs ads designed to lead naïve users to download unrelated adware. This needs to stop
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Bringing back the Somali shilling
Somalia has long played host to one of the world's strangest monetary phenomenon, a paper currency without a central bank. I explored the...
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Verizon announces plans to install a download-tracking app on its Android phones
UPDATE: We have received additional information from Verizon and based on that information we are withdrawing this post while we investigate further. Here is the statement from Kelly Crummey, Director of Corporate Communications of Verizon: "As we said earlier this week, we are testing AppFlash to...
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The threat from within
Former Provost John Etchemendy, in a recent speech before the Stanford Board of Trustees, outlined challenges higher education is facing in the coming years. Following is an excerpt from that talk.
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A Copyright Vote That Could Change the EU’s Internet
On October 10, EU lawmakers will vote on a dangerous proposal to change copyright law. Mozilla is urging EU citizens to demand better reforms. On Octobe
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To Serve Man, with Software
I didn’t choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field with
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Twitter, but for Math, with Toots
Hooray, it’s yet another social network for you to join! I’m skeptical about new social media, but I’ve been seeing enough posts about mathstodon.xyz that I finally caved and got an account. Mathstodon is the math(s) “instance” of mastodon , a new open-source, decentralized microblogging social network. It’s a lot…
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A CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate from the Bay
Wade Foster [https://twitter.com/wadefoster] is the CEO of Zapier [https://zapier.com/] (YC S12). Read Zapier’s de-location post here [https://zapier.com/blog/move-away-from-sf-get-remote-job/]. If you are interested in remote work, you can also check out our interview with Gitlab…
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Exploring strategies to decarbonize electricity
The Google Research team built a tool that allows users to quickly see how different factors affect the future cost to generate electricity and the amount of carbon diox…