Year: 2013
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Groklaw Shuts Down, Citing NSA Eavesdropping
The legendary technology law blog Groklaw is shutting down. Groklaw’s founder and operator, Pamela “PJ” Jones, wrote that in light of current eavesdropping, email is no longer secure. She went on to say: There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum. […] What to do? I’ve spent the last couple…
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Ethical dilemmas faced by software engineers: A request for real-world examples
Software developers create the architectures that govern our online and often our offline lives — from software-controlled cars and medical systems to digital content consumption and behavioral advertising. In fact, software shapes our societal values. Are the creators of code aware of the power that they wield, and the responsibilities that go with it? As…
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Educating Leaders who Tackle the Challenges of their Time; Lessons from the Past: Book Review: First Class, The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School
One of last year’s CITP lectures that is still fresh in my mind is Brad Smith’s talk on “Immigration, Education, and the Future of Computer Science in America.” In his presentation on developing a process for educating the next generation of computer scientists in U.S. high schools and colleges, Mr. Smith noted that in the…
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British Court Blocks Publication of Car Security Paper
Recently a British court ordered researchers to withdraw a paper, “Dismantling Megamos Security: Wirelessly Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobiliser” from next week’s USENIX Security Symposium. This is a blow not only to academic freedom but also to progress in vehicle security. And for those of us who have worked in security for a long time, it…
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Google Glass vuln in QR codes and ballot marking applications
Reading recently about a vulnerability in Google Glass that can be exploited if a victim takes a picture of a malicious QR code made me think about one of the current trends in absentee balloting. A number of localities in the US are trying out absentee ballot schemes where a voter goes to a website…
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MIT asks to intervene in Swartz FOIA suit
Yesterday MIT filed papers asking to intervene in journalist Kevin Poulsen’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking the Secret Service’s records of the agency’s investigation of Aaron Swartz. Poulsen had won a court order requiring the Secret Service to turn over its documents about Aaron, who took his own life while facing aggressive criminal…
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Take Over My Dream Job: Associate Director at CITP
Nearly four years ago, I joined the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton as Associate Director. The CITP community is a fantastic collection of smart and funny people who work passionately on all aspects of information technology policy. It was my dream job, so it was bittersweet when I accepted a new job working…
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Regulating Bitcoin
On Tuesday the State of California sent a letter to the Bitcoin Foundation, saying that the Foundation might be in violation of California’s law against running an unregistered money transmission business. The letter isn’t important in the grand scheme of things—it’s clear that the Bitcoin Foundation isn’t transmitting money—but it does raise the obvious question…
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Open-source Governance in Bitcoin
Josh Kroll, Ian Davey, and I have a new paper, The Economics of Bitcoin Mining, or Bitcoin in the Presence of Adversaries, from the Workshop on Economics of Information Security. Our paper looks at the dynamics of Bitcoin, how resilient it would be in the face of attacks, and how Bitcoin is governed. Today I…
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I Join the EFF and Others in Calling for Craigslist to Drop CFAA Claims
[Cross-posted on my blog, Managing Miracles] Craigslist is suing several companies that scrape data from Craigslist advertisements. These companies, like Padmapper and 3taps, repurpose the data in order to provide more useful ways of searching through the ads. I have written about this in earlier posts, “Dear Craig: Voluntarily Dismiss with Prejudice,” and “A Response…