Society

A company got access to a mobile phone-tracking tool used by law enforcement and U.S. government agencies across the country. They found significant privacy vulnerabilities.

Privacy advocates gained access to a powerful tool bought by U.S. law enforcement agencies that can track smartphone locations around the world. Abortion clinics, places of worship, and individual people can all be monitored without a warrant.

Not long ago, the ability to remotely track someone’s daily movements just by knowing their home address, employer, or place of worship was considered a powerful surveillance tool that should only be in the purview of nation states. But a…

ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.

From brushmakers to glassblowers, and saddlers to weavers, we meet the people keeping traditional crafts alive in the UK

Society should withhold all esteem and attention to a nonfiction author whose entire oeuvre spitballs explanatory social theory under the bad faith idea that he holds his ideas “loosely” and readers should too The Washington Post: Malcolm Gladwell's new book rehashes "The Tipping Point" I wrote a review of Malcolm

The Swiss 10-centime coin has a lot to teach us about monetary economics. On its face, the Swiss 10-centime (rappen in German) looks like a ...

Only Forward is a science fiction novel by English writer Michael Marshall Smith; his debut novel, it was first published in 1994 by HarperCollins. It was the winner of the August Derleth Award (1995) and Philip K. Dick Award (2000).

Some people just don’t know how to take a hint. For more than a decade, giant standards-development organizations (SDOs) have been fighting in courts around the country, trying use copyright law to control access to other laws.

The IDF’s AI-assisted systems allow the military to bypass the many intelligence analysts, munitions experts and...

Rax King on the film Anora

No.329 — It feels like 2004 again ⊗ Three Future Frames ⊗ What is futures literacy ⊗ Cracks in LLMs’ “reasoning” capabilities ⊗ Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year

Our book Moonshots for Europe demands a new, courageous leadership for the next decades.

The dark forest hypothesis is the conjecture that many alien civilizations exist throughout the universe, but they are both silent and hostile, maintaining their undetectability for fear of being destroyed by another hostile and undetected civilization.[1] It is one of many possible explanations of the Fermi paradox, which contrasts the lack of contact with alien life with the potential for such contact. The hypothesis derives its name from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest,[2] although the concept predates the novel.[3][4]

Why the dark forests of the internet — podcasts, newsletters, and other private channels — are growing, and why might that pose a problem

These people share conspiracy theories to promote conflict, cause chaos, recruit and radicalize potential followers, make money, harass, or even just to get attention.

Keeping a gun can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Politicians need to get realistic about what it will take to protect Social Security.

When millions of people are under evacuation orders, logistical issues arise.

You know what your mom would say, right? This week, we got an above average number of useless negative comments. A project was described as looking like a “turd” – for the record I love the hacker’…

Noam Chomsky's savage review of B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity, published in The New York Review of Books in 1971, is sometimes credited as the coup de grâce to behaviorism – its widely-read condemnation of that particular strand of psychology (alongside what Chomsky argued were its political ramifications) published