Month: February 2018
-
No boundaries for credentials: New password leaks to Mixpanel and Session Replay Companies
In this installment of the “No Boundaries” series we show how wholesale collection of user interactions by third-party analytics and session replay scripts cause inadvertent collection of passwords. By Steve Englehardt, Gunes Acar and Arvind Narayanan Following the recent report that Mixpanel, a popular analytics provider, had been inadvertently collecting passwords that users typed into…
-
Blockchain: What is it good for?
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are surrounded by world-historic levels of hype and snake oil. For people like me who take the old-fashioned view that technical claims should be backed by sound arguments and evidence, it’s easy to fall into the trap of concluding that there is no there there–and that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are fundamentally useless.…
-
How Tech is Failing Victims of Intimate Partner Violence: Thomas Ristenpart at CITP
What technology risks are faced by people who experience intimate partner violence? How is the security community failing them, and what questions might we need to ask to make progress on social and technical interventions? Speaking Tuesday at CITP was Thomas Ristenpart (@TomRistenpart), an associate professor at Cornell Tech and a member of the Department…
-
Are voting-machine modems truly divorced from the Internet?
(This article is written jointly with my colleague Kyle Jamieson, who specializes in wireless networks.) [See also: The myth of the hacker-proof voting machine] The ES&S model DS200 optical-scan voting machine has a cell-phone modem that it uses to upload election-night results from the voting machine to the “county central” canvassing computer. We know it’s…
-
(Mis)conceptions About the Impact of Surveillance
Does surveillance impact behavior? Or is its effect, if real, only temporary or trivial? Government surveillance is back in the news thanks to the so-called “Nunes memo”, making this is a perfect time to examine new research on the impact of surveillance. This includes my own recent work, as my doctoral research at the Oxford Internet Institute,…
-
Software-Defined Networking: What’s New, and What’s New For Tech Policy?
The Silicon Flatirons Conference on Regulating Computing and Code is taking place in Boulder. The annual conference addresses a range of issues at the intersection of technology and policy and provides an excellent look ahead to the tech policy issues on the horizon, particularly in telecommunications. I was looking forward to yesterday’s panel on “The…
-
Making Sense of Child Protection Predictive Models: Tech-Soc Reading Group Feb 20
How are predictive models transforming how we think about child protection, and how should we think about the role of such systems in a democracy? If you’re interested to ask these questions, join us at 2-3pm on Tuesday, Feb 20th at Sherrerd Hall room 306 for our opening Technology and Society Reading group meeting. The conversation…
-
How Data Science and Open Science are Transforming Research Ethics: Edward Freeland at CITP
How are data science and open science movement transforming how researchers manage research ethics? And how are these changes influencing public trust in social research? I’m here at the Center for IT Policy to hear a talk by Edward P. Freeland. Edward is the associate director of the Princeton University Survey Research Center and a…
-
Why Everyone in Tech Should Visit the American Museum of Tort Law
This Monday, Nikki Bourassa and I organized a van from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society to visit the American Museum of Tort Law, which I have decided to call the American Museum of Exploding Cars and Toys that Kill You. While at the museum, I came to see another way that research can…