Author: Ed Felten
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Why did anybody believe Haystack?
Haystack, a hyped technology that claimed to help political dissidents hide their Internet traffic from their governments, has been pulled by its promoters after independent researchers got a chance to study it and found severe problems. This should come as a surprise to nobody. Haystack exhibited the warning signs of security snake oil: the flamboyant,…
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It’s Time for India to Face its E-Voting Problem
The unjustified arrest of Indian e-voting researcher Hari Prasad, while an ordeal for Prasad and his family, and an embarrassment to the Indian authorities, has at least helped to focus attention on India’s risky electronic voting machines (EVMs). Sadly, the Election Commission of India, which oversees the country’s elections, is still sticking to its position…
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My Experiment with "Digital Drugs"
The latest scare meme is “digital drugs” or “i-dosing”, in which kids listen to audio tracks that supposedly induce altered mental states. Concerned adults fear that these “digital drugs” may be a gateway to harder (i.e., actual) drugs. Rumors are circulating among some kids: “I heard it was like some weird demons and stuff through…
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Identifying Trends that Drive Technology
I’m trying to compile a list of major technological and societal trends that influence U.S. computing research. Here’s my initial list. Please post your own suggestions! Ubiquitous connectivity, and thus true mobility Massive computational capability available to everyone, through the cloud Exponentially increasing data volumes – from ubiquitous sensors, from higher-volume sensors (digital imagers everywhere!),…
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The Stock-market Flash Crash: Attack, Bug, or Gamesmanship?
Andrew wrote last week about the stock market’s May 6 “flash crash”, and whether it might have been caused by a denial-of-service attack. He points to a detailed analysis by nanex.com that unpacks what happened and postulates a DoS attack as a likely cause. The nanex analysis is interesting and suggestive, but I see the…
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How Not to Fix Soccer
With the World Cup comes the quadrennial ritual in which Americans try to redesign and improve the rules of soccer. As usual, it’s a bad idea to redesign something you don’t understand—and indeed, most of the proposed changes would be harmful. What has surprised me, though, is how rarely anyone explains the rationale behind soccer’s…
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NJ Voting Machines Left Unattended, Despite Court Opinion
It’s Election Day in New Jersey. Longtime readers know that in advance of elections I visit polling places in Princeton, looking for voting machines left unattended, where they are vulnerable to tampering. In the past I have always found unattended machines in multiple polling places. I hoped this time would be different, given that Judge…
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Privacy Theater
I have a piece in today’s NY Times “Room for Debate” feature, on whether the government should regulate Facebook. In writing the piece, I was looking for a pithy way to express the problems with today’s notice-and-consent model for online privacy. After some thought, I settled on “privacy theater”. Bruce Schneier has popularized the term…
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Developing Texts Like We Develop Software
Recently I was asked to speak at a conference for university librarians, about how the future of academic publication looks to me as a computer scientist. It’s an interesting question. What do computer scientists have to teach humanists about how to write? Surely not our elegant prose style. There is something distinctive about how computer…
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India's Electronic Voting Machines Have Security Problems
A team led by Hari Prasad, Alex Halderman, and Rop Gonggrijp released today a technical paper detailing serious security problems with the electronic voting machines (EVMs) used in India. The independent Electoral Commission of India, which is generally well respected, has dealt poorly with previous questions about EVM security. The chair of the Electoral Commission…