CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Month: June 2004

  • FTC: Do-Not-Email List Won't Help

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    Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission released its recommendation to Congress regarding the proposed national Do Not Email list. They recommended against the creation of such a list at the present time, because the list would provide little or no reduction in spam, but would increase costs for legitimate emailers and might raise security risks. Congress,…

  • Off the Grid?

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    I’ll be in a place with a possibly iffy Internet link until Monday evening. If you don’t hear from me in the next few days, I’m probably incommunicado; but please tune back in on Tuesday.

  • Rubin and Rescorla on E-Voting

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    There are two interesting new posts on e-voting over on ATAC. In one post, Avi Rubin suggests a “hacking challenge” for e-voting technology: let experts tweak an existing e-voting system to rig it for one candidate, and then inject the tweaked system quietly into the certification pipeline and see if it passes. (All of this…

  • Google Hires Ph.D.'s; Times Surprised

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    Yesterday’s New York Times ran a story by Randall Stross, marveling at the number of Ph.D.’s working at Google. Indeed, the story marveled about Google wanting to hire Ph.D.’s at all. Many other companies shun Ph.D.’s. Deciding whether to hire bachelors-level employees or Ph.D.’s really boils down to whether you want employees who are good…

  • Designed for Spying

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    A Mark Glassman story at the New York Times discusses the didtheyreadit email-tracking software that I wrote about previously. The story quotes the head of didtheyreadit as saying that the purpose of the software is to tell whether an email reached its intended recipient. “I won’t deny that it has a potentially stealth purpose,” he…

  • Wireless Unleashed

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    WirelessUnleashed is a new group blog, dedicated to wireless policy, from Kevin Werbach, Andrew Odlyzko, David Isenberg, and Clay Shirky. Based on the author-list alone, it’s worth our attention.

  • E-Voting Testing Labs Not Independent

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    E-voting vendors often argue that their systems must be secure, because they have been tested by “independent” labs. Elise Ackerman’s story in Sunday’s San Jose Mercury-News explains the depressing truth about how the testing process works. There are only three labs, and they are overseen by a private body that is supported financially by the…

  • The Creation of the Media

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    I just finished reading “The Creation of the Media,” by Paul Starr, a sociology professor here at Princeton. This is an important book and I recommend it highly. Starr traces the history of communications and the media in the U.S., from the 1700s until 1940. The major theme of the book is that the unique…