Author: Ed Felten
-
Government Online: Outreach vs. Transparency
These days everybody in Washington seems to be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. The latest jumpers are four House committees, according to Tech Daily Dose. The committees, like a growing number of individual members’ offices, plan to use Twitter as a new tool to reach their audience and ensure transparency between the government and the…
-
Kundra Named As Federal CIO
Today, the Obama administration named Vivek Kundra as the Chief Information Officer of the U.S. government, a newly created position. This is great news. Kundra, in his previous role as CTO of the District of Columbia, made great strides in opening the DC government by publishing government data. When he spoke at our Thursday Forum…
-
New Internet? No Thanks.
Yesterday’s New York Times ran a piece, “Do We Need a New Internet?” suggesting that the Internet has too many security problems and should therefore be rebuilt. The piece has been widely criticized in the technical blogosphere, so there’s no need for me to pile on. Anyway, I have already written about the redesign-the-Net meme.…
-
Please participate in research project — requires only one click
As part of a research project on web browser security we are currently taking a “census” of browser installations. We hope you’ll agree to participate. If you do participate, a small snippet of JavaScript will collect your browser’s settings and send them to our server. We will record a cryptographic hash of those settings in…
-
DRM In Retreat
Last week’s agreement between Apple and the major record companies to eliminate DRM (copy protection) in iTunes songs marks the effective end of DRM for recorded music. The major online music stores are now all DRM-free, and CDs still lack DRM, so consumers who acquire music will now expect it without DRM. That’s a sensible…
-
Tech Policy Challenges for the Obama Administration
[Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School asked me to write a short essay on information technology challenges facing the Obama Administration, as part of the School’s Inaugural activities. Here is my essay.] Digital technologies can make government more effective, open and transparent, and can make the economy as a whole more flexible and efficient. They can also…
-
Debugging the Zune Blackout
On December 31, some models of the Zune, Microsoft’s portable music player, went dark. The devices were unusable until the following day. Failures like this are sometimes caused by complex chains of mishaps, but this particular one is due to a single programming error that is reasonably easy to understand. Let’s take a look. Here…
-
Predictions for 2009
Here are our predictions for 2009. These are based on input from Andrew Appel, Joe Calandrino, Will Clarkson, Ari Feldman, Ed Felten, Alex Halderman, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Tim Lee, Paul Ohm, David Robinson, Dan Wallach, Harlan Yu, and Bill Zeller. Please note that individual contributors (including me) don’t necessarily agree with all of these predictions.…
-
2008 Predictions Scorecard
As usual, we’ll kick off the new year by reviewing the predictions we made for the previous year. Here now, our 2008 predictions, in italics, with hindsight in ordinary type. (1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly. We predict this every year,…
-
Researchers Show How to Forge Site Certificates
Today at the Chaos Computing Congress, a group of researchers (Alex Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jake Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, Benne de Weger, and David Molnar) announced that they have found a way to forge website certificates that will be accepted as valid by most browsers. This means that they can successfully impersonate any website, even for…