Month: April 2009
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Acceptance rates at security conferences
How competitive are security research conferences? Several people have been tracking this information. Mihai Christodorescu has a nice chart of acceptance and submission rates over time. The most recent data point we have is the 2009 Usenix Security Symposium, which accepted 26 of 176 submissions (a 14.8% acceptance ratio, consistent with recent years). Acceptance rates…
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Chinese Internet Censorship: See It For Yourself
You probably know already that the Chinese government censors Internet traffic. But you might not have known that you can experience this censorship yourself. Here’s how: (1) Open up another browser window or tab, so you can browse without losing this page. (2) In the other window, browse to baidu.com. This is a search engine…
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Stimulus transparency and the states
Yesterday, I testified at a field hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The hearing title was The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: The Role of State and Local Governments. My written testimony addressed plans to put stimulus data on the Internet, primarily at Recovery.gov. There have been promising…
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FBI's Spyware Program
Note: I worked for the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) from 2001 to 2005. The documents discussed below mention a memo written by somebody at CCIPS during the time I worked there, but absolutely everything I say below reflects only my personal thoughts and impressions about the documents released to…
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On open source vs. disclosed source voting systems
Sometimes, working on voting seems like running on a treadmill. Old disagreements need to be argued again and again. As long as I’ve been speaking in public about voting, I’ve discussed the need for voting systems’ source code to be published, as in a book, to create transparency into how the systems operate. Or, put…
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Thoughts on juries for intellectual property lawsuits
Here’s a thought that’s been stuck in my head for the past few days. It would never be practical, but it’s an interesting idea to ponder. David Robinson tells me I’m not the first one to have this idea, either, but anyway… Consider what happens in intellectual property lawsuits, particularly concerning infringement of patents or…
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Fascinating New Blog: ComputationalLegalStudies.com
I was inspired to post the essay I discussed in the prior post by the debut of the best new law blog I have seen in a long time, Computational Legal Studies, featuring the work of Daniel Katz and Michael Bommarito, both graduate students in the University of Michigan’s political science department. Every single blog…
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Computer Programming and the Law: A New Research Agenda
By my best estimate, at least twenty different law professors on the tenure track at American law schools once held a job as a professional computer programmer. I am proud to say that two of us work at my law school. Most of these hyphenate lawprof-coders rarely write any code today, and this is a…