Year: 2015
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“Private blockchain” is just a confusing name for a shared database
Banks and financial institutions seem to be all over the blockchain. It seems they agree with the Bitcoin community that the technology behind Bitcoin can provide an efficient platform for settlement and for issuing digital assets. Curiously, though, they seem to shy away from Bitcoin itself. Instead, they want something they have more control over and doesn’t…
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Ancestry.com can use your DNA to target ads
With the reduction in costs of genotyping technology, genetic genealogy has become accessible to more people. Various websites such as Ancestry.com offer genetic genealogy services. Users of these services are mailed an envelope with a DNA collection kit, in which users deposit their saliva. The users then mail their kits back to the service and…
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Bitcoin course available on Coursera; textbook is now official
Earlier this year we made our online course on Bitcoin publicly available — 11 video lectures and draft chapters of our textbook-in-progress, including exercises. The response has been very positive: numerous students have sent us thanks, comments, feedback, and a few error corrections. We’ve heard that our materials are being used in courses at a few…
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Voting Every Day: Smartphones, Civil Rights and Civic Participation
The process of influencing government action has undergone a significant transformation in the age of the smartphone. Of course, the traditional lobbying business continues to thrive, with companies, trade associations and public interest advocacy groups relying on experienced experts to plead their cases in Washington, DC, and throughout the country. What the smartphone has done,…
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Robots don't threaten, but may be useful threats
Hi, I’m Joanna Bryson, and I’m just starting as a fellow at CITP, on sabbatical from the University of Bath. I’ve been blogging about natural and artificial intelligence since 2007, increasingly with attention to public policy. I’ve been writing about AI ethics since 1998. This is my first blog post for Freedom to Tinker. Will…
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How not to measure security
A recent paper published by Smartmatic, a vendor of voting systems, caught my attention. The first thing is that it’s published by Springer, which typically publishes peer-reviewed articles – which this is not. This is a marketing piece. It’s disturbing that a respected imprint like Springer would get into the business of publishing vendor white…
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The Defend Trade Secrets Act Has Returned
Freedom to Tinker readers may recall that I’ve previously warned about legislation to create a federal private cause of action for trade secret misappropriation in the name of fighting cyber-espionage against United States businesses. Titled the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), it failed to move last year. Well, the concerning legislation has returned, and, although it has some changes,…
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Does cloud mining make sense?
[Paul Ellenbogen is a second year Ph.D. student at Princeton who’s been looking into the economics and game theory of Bitcoin, among other topics. He’s a coauthor of our recent paper on Namecoin and namespaces. — Arvind Narayanan] Currently, if I wanted to mine Bitcoin I would need to buy specialized hardware, called application-specific integrated…
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The Chilling Effects of Confidentiality Creep
Today, North Carolina’s Governor Pat McCrory has a bill on his desk that would make it impossible for the public to find out what entities are supplying the chemical cocktail – the drugs – to be used for lethal injections in North Carolina. Known as the Restoring Proper Justice Act (the “Act”), it defines “confidential…
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Analyzing the 2013 Bitcoin fork: centralized decision-making saved the day
On March 11, 2013, Bitcoin experienced a technical crisis. Versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the software diverged from each other in behavior due to a bug, causing the block chain to “fork” into two. Considering how catastrophic a hard fork can be, the crisis was resolved quickly with remarkably little damage owing to the exemplary…