Year: 2010
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Private Information in Public Court Filings
Court proceedings are supposed to be public. When they are public and easily accessible, citizens know the law and the courts are kept accountable. These are the principles that underpin RECAP, our project to help liberate federal court records from behind a pay-wall. However, appropriate restrictions on public disclosure are equally critical to democracy-enhancing information…
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Announcing the CITP Visitors for 2010-2011
We are delighted to announce the CITP visiting scholars, practitioners, and collaborators for the 2010-2011 academic year. The diverse group of leading thinkers represents CITP’s highly interdisciplinary interests. We are looking forward to their work at the center, and welcome them to the family. The short list is below, but you can see more description…
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A Good Day for Email Privacy: A Court Takes Back its Earlier, Bad Ruling in Rehberg v. Paulk
In March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the court that sets federal law for Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, ruled in an opinion in a case called Rehberg v. Paulk that people lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of email messages stored with an email provider. This meant that…
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My Experiment with "Digital Drugs"
The latest scare meme is “digital drugs” or “i-dosing”, in which kids listen to audio tracks that supposedly induce altered mental states. Concerned adults fear that these “digital drugs” may be a gateway to harder (i.e., actual) drugs. Rumors are circulating among some kids: “I heard it was like some weird demons and stuff through…
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Bilski and the Value of Experimentation
The Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision in Bilski v. Kappos brought closure to this particular patent prosecution, but not much clarity to the questions surrounding business method patents. The Court upheld the Federal Circuit’s conclusion that the claimed “procedure for instructing buyers and sellers how to protect against the risk of price fluctuations in a discrete…
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Identifying Trends that Drive Technology
I’m trying to compile a list of major technological and societal trends that influence U.S. computing research. Here’s my initial list. Please post your own suggestions! Ubiquitous connectivity, and thus true mobility Massive computational capability available to everyone, through the cloud Exponentially increasing data volumes – from ubiquitous sensors, from higher-volume sensors (digital imagers everywhere!),…
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The Stock-market Flash Crash: Attack, Bug, or Gamesmanship?
Andrew wrote last week about the stock market’s May 6 “flash crash”, and whether it might have been caused by a denial-of-service attack. He points to a detailed analysis by nanex.com that unpacks what happened and postulates a DoS attack as a likely cause. The nanex analysis is interesting and suggestive, but I see the…
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On kids and social networking
Sunday’s New York Times has an article about cyber-bullying that’s currently #1 on their “most popular” list, so this is clearly a topic that many find close and interesting. The NYT article focuses on schools’ central role in policing their students social behavior. While I’m all in favor of students being taught, particularly by older…
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Did a denial-of-service attack cause the stock-market "flash crash?"
On May 6, 2010, the stock market experienced a “flash crash”; the Dow plunged 998 points (most of which was in just a few minutes) before (mostly) recovering. Nobody was quite sure what caused it. An interesting theory from Nanex.com, based on extensive analysis of the actual electronic stock-quote traffic in the markets that day…
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Broadband Politics and Closed-Door Negotiations at the FCC
The last seven days at the FCC have been drama-filled, and that’s not something you can often say about an administrative agency. As I noted in my last post, the FCC is considering reclassifying broadband as a “common carrier” service. This would subject the access portion of the service to some additional regulations which currently…