Month: September 2012
-
Which States have the Highest Risk of an E-Voting Meltdown?
This post is joint work by Joshua Kroll, Ian Davey, Alex Halderman, and Ed Felten. Computer scientists, including us, have long been skeptical of electronic voting systems. E-voting systems are computers, with all of the attendant problems. If something goes wrong, can the problem be detected? Can it be fixed? Some e-voting systems are much…
-
Goodbye, Stanford. Hello, Princeton!
[Editor’s note: The Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) is delighted to welcome Arvind Narayanan as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science, and an affiliated faculty member in CITP. Narayanan is a leading researcher in digital privacy, data anonymization, and technology policy. His work has been widely published, and includes a paper with CITP co-authors…
-
Is Spotify the Celestial Jukebox for Music?
In 1994, law professor Paul Goldstein popularized the term “celestial jukebox” to refer to his vision of a networked database of consumable on-demand media. In the face of copyright law that was ill-suited to the rapid rate of technological change, he described a system in which consumers would pay-per-play rather than purchasing and owning individual…
-
Accountable Algorithms: An Example
I wrote yesterday about accountable algorithms. When I say that a public algorithm is “accountable” I mean that the output produced by a particular execution of the algorithm can be verified as correct after the fact by a skeptical member of the public. Today I want to work through an example.
-
Accountable Algorithms
Ethan Zuckerman had an interesting reaction to his first experience with the TSA Pre-Check program, which lets frequent flyers go through a much shorter and less elaborate procedure at airport security checkpoints. Ethan’s concerns about unfairness are worth pondering, but I want to focus here on his call for more openness about the algorithm that…
-
Privacy Threat Model for Mobile
Evaluating privacy vulnerabilities in the mobile space can be a difficult and ad hoc process for developers, publishers, regulators, and researchers. This is due, in significant part, to the absence of a well-developed and widely accepted privacy threat model. With 1 million UDIDs posted on the Internet this past week, there is an urgent need…
-
On the Harvard "Cheating" Scandal
The news that Harvard is investigating more than 100 students on charges of unauthorized collaboration on a take-home exam has, predictably, led many commentators to chime in. No matter who you are, a story like this is likely to trigger one of your hot buttons, whether it’s the declining moral standards of kids these days,…