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President Signs Government-Wide Open Data Bill
The Data Coalition is dedicated to improving government, business, and society through open data and evidence-informed public policy
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Trolls Are Real
In most issues of EFFector, we give an overview of all the work we’re doing at EFF. Today, in light of recent developments at the U.S. Patent Office, we’re doing a deep dive into a single issue: recent changes to the patent system, and how it’s in danger of heading backwards.
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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
Background : “IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning…
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ProtonMail Voluntarily Offers Assistance for Real-Time Surveillance?
Proton Mail disputed some of the content of the post originally published at this location. We will continue the discussion directly with Proton Mail, in particular at a meeting in …
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RIP Culture War Thread
[This post is having major technical issues. Some comments may not be appearing. If you can’t comment, please say so on the subreddit.] I. I Come To Praise Caesar, Not To Bury Him Several yea…
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The importance of decentralisation
Affordable VM hosting in Glarus, Switzerland, operated by 100% hydropower. Devuan, debian, freebsd, ubuntu, centos. Our tech stack is fully open source.
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Researchers find trapdoor in SwissVote election system
A team of researchers have examined the source code published as part of the SwissPost e-voting system, provided by Scytl, and discovered a cryptographic trapdoor.
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Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
Gideon Lewis-Kraus ( Jan. 17 ) profiles the nascent field of ancient DNA, which in the last few years has contributed to a transformation in our understanding of the deep human past. His article touches on important issues that we, as a field, have yet to deal with fully: including how to handle ancient remains…
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CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
Follow up: Cloudflare: Making the internet a little bit faster – for a select group of people CloudFlare is a very helpful service if you are a website owner and don’t want to deal with separate…
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What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
The UC Negotiating Team Ivy Anderson, (Co-Chair), Associate Executive Director of the California Digital Library; Jeffrey MacKie-Mason (Co-Chair), University Librarian and Professor, School of Information and Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley; Günter Waibel, Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director of the…
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Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964
This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s . Those stories were published in issues of magazines that didn't send in the renewal form. But up til now this hasn't been a big factor, because 1) the big publishers generally made sure to send in their renewals…
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Microsoft Advertisement Inc.
Advertisement needs to end. It is insane to think that a piece of software, so fundamental to running computers, an operating system is selling user behavior to advertisers.
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My Product Is Unexpectedly Being Used to Help People with Dementia
One of the more heartwarming moments of my journey building NanaGram was totally unexpected. A few months after launching, I built a way for customers to post reviews. These automatically get posted to the home page. Within a couple weeks, two customers sent reviews mentioning how their loved one has dementia and…
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Eliminating Robocalls
Twilio's CEO talks about trusted communications, reputation, robocalling, and making it safe to pick up your phone again.
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Media Can’t Stop Presenting Horrifying Stories as ‘Uplifting’ Perseverance Porn
In the popular trend of unintentionally horrifying “uplifting” news, out-of-touch corporate media give us supposedly charming, wholesome and positive news that actually, upon even minimal retrospection, reveals the dire conditions of late capitalism so many Americans now live under, and makes you feel worse after…
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NYC Mesh Begins Broadband Expansion in Brooklyn
Building a community-owned and -operated internet network for all New Yorkers
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Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive
Update, 25 March: The Italian, Galician, Asturian, and Catalan Wikipedias have blacked themselves out today to protest the EU Copyright Directive. Other language versions of Wikipedia have chosen to show site banners above their content. Wikipedia’s volunteer editing communities make decisions like this independently…
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The StingRay Is Why the 4th Amendment Was Written (2017)
The drafters of the Constitution recognized that restricting the government from violating privacy is essential for a free society. That's why the Fourth Amendment exists. The StingRay clearly violates these standards.
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Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email
In November 2017, I deactivated my account on Facebook. I didn’t leave Facebook for moral reasons back then but more because it was starting to feel like a waste of time and valuable brain cy…