Author: Ed Felten
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The Role of Worst Practices in Insecurity
These days, security advisors talk a lot about Best Practices: establishes procedures that are generally held to yield good results. Deploy Best Practices in your organization, the advisors say, and your security will improve. That’s true, as far as it goes, but often we can make more progress by working to eliminate Worst Practices. A…
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DARPA Pays MIT to Pay Someone Who Recruited Someone Who Recruited Someone Who Recruited Someone Who Found a Red Balloon
DARPA, the Defense Department’s research arm, recently sponsored a “Network Challenge” in which groups competed to find ten big red weather balloons that were positioned in public places around the U.S. The first team to discover where all the balloons were would win $40,000. A team from MIT won, using a clever method of sharing…
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Soghoian: 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight
If you’re interested at all in surveillance policy, go and read Chris Soghoian’s long and impassioned post today. Chris drops several bombshells into the debate, including an audio recording of a closed-door talk by Sprint/NexTel’s Electronic Surveillance Manager, bragging about how easy the company has made it for law enforcement to get customers’ location data…
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Tech Policy in the SkyMall Catalog
These days tech policy issues seem to pop up everywhere. During a recent flight delay, I was flipping through the SkyMall Catalog (“Holiday 2009” edition), and found tech policy even there. There were lots of ads for surveillance and recording devices, some of them clearly useful for illegal purposes: the New Agent Cam HD Color…
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Robots and the Law
Stanford Law School held a panel Thursday on “Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics”. I happened to be in town so I dropped by and heard an interesting discussion. Here’s the official announcement: Once relegated to factories and fiction, robots are rapidly entering the mainstream. Advances in artificial intelligence translate into ever-broadening functionality and…
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Targeted Copyright Enforcement vs. Inaccurate Enforcement
Let’s continue our discussion about copyright enforcement against online infringers. I wrote last time about how targeted enforcement can deter many possible violators even if the enforcer can only punish a few violators. Clever targeting of enforcement can destroy the safety-in-numbers effect that might otherwise shelter a crowd of would-be violators. In the online copyright…
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Targeted Copyright Enforcement: Deterring Many Users with a Few Lawsuits
One reason the record industry’s strategy of suing online infringers ran into trouble is that there are too many infringers to sue. If the industry can only sue a tiny fraction of infringers, then any individual infringer will know that he is very unlikely to be sued, and deterrence will fail. Or so it might…
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New York AG Files Antitrust Suit Against Intel
Yesterday, New York’s state Attorney General filed what could turn out to be a major antitrust suit against Intel. The suit accuses Intel of taking illegal steps to exclude a competitor, AMD, from the market. All we have so far is the NYAG’s complaint, which tells one side of the case. Intel will have ample…
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Election Day; More Unguarded Voting Machines
It’s Election Day in New Jersey. As usual, I visited several polling places in Princeton over the last few days, looking for unguarded voting machines. It’s been well demonstrated that a bad actor who can get physical access to a New Jersey voting machine can modify its behavior to steal votes, so an unguarded voting…
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Sequoia Announces Voting System with Published Code
Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the major e-voting companies, announced Tuesday that it will publish all of the source code for its forthcoming Frontier product. This is great news–an important step toward the kind of transparency that is necessary to make today’s voting systems trustworthy. To be clear, this will not be a fully open…