Year: 2010
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Government Datasets That Facilitate Innovation
[This is the first post in a series on best practices for government datasets by Harlan Yu and me.] There’s a growing consensus that the government can increase its openness and transparency by publishing its raw data in bulk online. As several Freedom to Tinker contributors argued in Government Data and the Invisible Hand, publishing…
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Web Certification Fail: Bad Assumptions Lead to Bad Technology
It should be abundantly clear, from two recent posts here, that the current model for certifying the identity of web sites is deeply flawed. When you connect to a web site, and your browser displays an https URL and a happy lock or key icon indicating a secure connection, the odds that you’re connecting to…
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Web Security Trust Models
[This is part of a series of posts on this topic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.] Last week, Ed described the current debate over whether Mozilla should allow an organization that is allegedly controlled by the Chinese government to be a default trusted certificate authority. The post prompted some very insightful feedback,…
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Google Buzzkill
The launch of Google Buzz, the new social networking service tied to GMail, was a fiasco to say the least. Its default settings exposed people’s e-mail contacts in frightening ways with serious privacy and human rights implications. Evgeny Morozov, who specializes in analyzing how authoritarian regimes use the Internet, put it bluntly last Friday in…
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Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese CA
[Note our follow-up posts on this topic: Web Security Trust Models, and Web Certification Fail: Bad Assumptions Lead to Bad Technology] Sometimes geeky technical details matter only to engineers. But sometimes a seemingly arcane technical decision exposes deep social or political divisions. A classic example is being debated within the Mozilla project now, as designers…
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The Engine of Job Growth? Tracking SBA-backed Loans Through Recovery.gov
Last week at a Town Hall Meeting in New Hampshire, President Obama stated that “we’re going to start where most new jobs start—with small businesses,” and he encouraged Congress to transfer $30 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to a new program called the Small Business Lending Fund. As this proposal was unveiled, the…
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The Traceability of an Anonymous Online Comment
Yesterday, I described a simple scenario where a plaintiff, who is having difficulty identifying an alleged online defamer, could benefit from subpoenaing data held by a third party web service provider. Some third parties—like Facebook in yesterday’s example—know exactly who I am and know whenever I visit or post on other sites. But even when…
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What Third Parties Know About John Doe
As David mentioned in his previous post, plaintiffs’ lawyers in online defamation suits will typically issue a sequence of two “John Doe” subpoenas to try to unmask the identity of anonymous online speakers. The first subpoena goes to the website or content provider where the allegedly defamatory remarks were posted, and the second subpoena is…
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Identifying John Doe: It might be easier than you think
Imagine that you want to sue someone for what they wrote, anonymously, in a web-based online forum. To succeed, you’ll first have to figure out who they really are. How hard is that task? It’s a question that Harlan Yu, Ed Felten, and I have been kicking around for several months. We’ve come to some…
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CITP Seeks Visiting Faculty, Scholars or Policy Experts for 2010-2011
The Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University seeks candidates for positions as visiting faculty members or researchers, or postdoctoral research associates for the 2010-2011 academic year. About CITP Digital technologies and public life are constantly reshaping each other—from net neutrality and broadband adoption, to copyright and file sharing, to electronic voting and…