Year: 2013
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Let's stop Nigerian scams once and for good
A personal friend of mine’s Yahoo account was recently hacked by a Nigerian scammer. I know this because the email I got (“I’m stuck in the Philippines and need you to wire money”) had an IP address in a “Received” header that pointed squarely at Lagos, Nigeria. The modus operandi of these scammers is well…
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Principles #4 and #5 for Fostering Civic Engagement Through Digital Technologies: Engage On-line and Off-line, and Prepare for the Future
As part of my continuing series, today I’ll discuss two more principles for fostering civic engagement and digital technologies. My earlier posts are: #1 Know Your Community #2 Keep it Simple #3 Leverage Entrepreneurial Intermediaries Principle #4: Utilize Creative Combinations of On-line and Off-line Communications Whether it’s a grass roots organization, national political campaign or…
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Drones over Princeton: A Goofy Video About a Serious Issue
Last week, privacy attorney Grayson Barber brought her “drone” to CITP in order to do a demo at her talk, “Drones Are Like Flying Computers.” Grayson discussed the many serious legal issues raised by drones (you can watch the video of her presentation here). But her drone takes great video, so I couldn’t resist making…
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Internet Voting Security: Wishful Thinking Doesn’t Make It True
[The following is a post written at my invitation by Professor Duncan Buell from the University of South Carolina. Curiously, the poll Professor Buell mentions below is no longer listed in the list of past & present polls on the Courier-Journal site, but is available if you kept the link.] On Thursday, March 21, in…
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Two Major updates to RECAP: Developers from Around the World Write Code in Memory of Aaron Swartz
A little over two months ago, we joined with the Think Computer Foundation to offer a set of grants in memory of our friend Aaron Swartz. Aaron worked on many issues in his too-short life, but one of those was liberating American court records from behind a pay-wall. He helped to inspire our RECAP project,…
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The District of Columbia Claims Copyright on the Law
Update: They released the unofficial version of the DC Code under a CC-0 License. Josh Tauberer has the backstory. Copyright exists to incentivize people to create new works. The federal government is not allowed to copyright things, because they don’t need the added incentive, and it would be bad if they started charging for access…
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Security Lessons from the Big DDoS Attacks
Last week saw news of new Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These may be the largest DDoS attacks ever, peaking at about 300 Gbps (that is, 300 billion bits per second) of traffic aimed at the target but, notwithstanding some of the breathless news coverage, these attacks are not vastly larger than anything before.…
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How the DMCA Chills Research
I have a new piece in Slate, on how the DMCA chills security research. In the piece, I tell three stories of DMCA threats against Alex Halderman and me, and talk about how Congress can fix the problem. “The Chilling Effects of the DMCA: The outdated copyright law doesn’t just hurt consumers—it cripples researchers.” “These…
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The New Freedom to Tinker Movement
When I started this blog back in 2002, I named it “Freedom to Tinker.” On the masthead, below the words Freedom to Tinker, was the subhead “… is your freedom to understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technological devices you own.” I believed at the time, as I still do, that this freedom is more…
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How the DMCA Serves as a Barrier to Accessibility
My op-ed on the DMCA’s barriers to accessibility just went live at Slate’s Future Tense. Here’s an excerpt: [A]mong the DMCA’s many flaws is a significant one of which most people aren’t aware: For more than a decade, the act has imposed a barrier to access for people with disabilities. It hinders access to books,…