Month: June 2011
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Supreme Court Takes Important GPS Tracking Case
This morning, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal next term of United States v. Jones (formerly United States v. Maynard), a case in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals suppressed evidence of a criminal defendant’s travels around town, which the police collected using a tracking device they attached to his car. For…
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What Gets Redacted in Pacer?
In my research on privacy problems in PACER, I spent a lot of time examining PACER documents. In addition to researching the problem of “bad” redactions, I was also interested in learning about the pattern of redactions generally. To this end, my software looked for two redaction styles. One is the “black rectangle” redaction method…
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Universities in Brazil are too closed to the world, and that's bad for innovation
When Brazilian president Dilma Roussef visited China in the beginning of May, she came back with some good news (maybe too good to be entirely true). Among them, the announcement that Foxconn, the largest maker of electronic components, will invest US$12 billion to open a large industrial plant in the country. The goal is to…
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Deceptive Assurances of Privacy?
Earlier this week, Facebook expanded the roll-out of its facial recognition software to tag people in photos uploaded to the social networking site. Many observers and regulators responded with privacy concerns; EFF offered a video showing users how to opt-out. Tim O’Reilly, however, takes a different tack: Face recognition is here to stay. My question…
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New Research Result: Bubble Forms Not So Anonymous
Today, Joe Calandrino, Ed Felten and I are releasing a new result regarding the anonymity of fill-in-the-bubble forms. These forms, popular for their use with standardized tests, require respondents to select answer choices by filling in a corresponding bubble. Contradicting a widespread implicit assumption, we show that individuals create distinctive marks on these forms, allowing…
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Tinkering with the IEEE and ACM copyright policies
It’s historically been the case that papers published in an IEEE or ACM conference or journal must have their copyrights assigned to the IEEE or ACM, respectively. Most of us were happy with this sort of arrangement, but the new IEEE policy seems to apply more restrictions on this process. Matt Blaze blogged about this…