Author: Ed Felten
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Princeton likely to rescind grade deflation policy
A Princeton faculty committee recommended yesterday that the university rescind its ten-year-old grading guideline that advises faculty to assign grades in the A range to at most 35% of students. The committee issued a report explaining its rationale. The recommendation will probably be accepted and implemented. It’s a good report, and I agree with its…
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Why were CERT researchers attacking Tor?
Yesterday the Tor Project issued an advisory describing a large-scale identification attack on Tor hidden services. The attack started on January 30 and ended when Tor ejected the attackers on July 4. It appears that this attack was the subject of a Black Hat talk that was canceled abruptly. These attacks raise serious questions about…
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On the Ethics of A/B Testing
The discussion triggered by Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has been enlightening and frustrating at the same time. An enlightening aspect is how it has exposed divergent views on a practice called A/B testing, in which a company provides two versions of its service to randomly-chosen groups of users, and then measures how the users react.…
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Privacy Implications of Social Media Manipulation
The ethical debate about Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has rightly focused on Facebook’s manipulation of what users saw, rather than the “pure privacy” issue of which information was collected and how it was used. It’s tempting to conclude that because Facebook didn’t change their data collection procedures, the experiment couldn’t possibly have affected users’ privacy…
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Facebook's Emotional Manipulation Study: When Ethical Worlds Collide
The research community is buzzing about the ethics of Facebook’s now-famous experiment in which it manipulated the emotional content of users’ news feeds to see how that would affect users’ activity on the site. (The paper, by Adam Kramer of Facebook, Jamie Guillory of UCSF, and Jeffrey Hancock of Cornell, appeared in Proceedings of the…
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Bitcoin Mining Now Dominated by One Pool
The big news in the Bitcoin world, is that one entity, called GHash, seems to be in control of more than half of all of the mining power. A part of Bitcoin’s appeal has been its distributed nature: the idea that no one party is in control but the system operates through the cooperative action…
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Mesh Networks Won't Fix Internet Security
There’s no doubt that the quality of tech reporting in major newspapers has improved in recent years. It’s rare these days to see a story in, say, the New York Times whose fundamental technical premise is wrong. Still, it does happen occasionally—as it did yesterday. Yesterday’s Times ran a story gushing about mesh networks as…
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How to protect yourself from Heartbleed
The Heartbleed vulnerability is one of the worst Internet security problems we have seen. I’ll be writing more about what we can learn from Heartbleed and the response to it. For now, here is a quick checklist of what you can do to protect yourself.
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Secure protocols for accountable warrant execution
Last week the press reported that the White House will seek to redesign the NSA’s mass phone call data program, so that data will be held by the phone companies and accessed by the NSA, subject to a new warrant requirement. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will issue the warrants. Today Josh Kroll and I,…
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Algorithms can be more accountable than people
At an academic meeting recently, I was surprised to hear some social scientists accept as obviously correct the claim that involving “algorithms” in decision-making, instead of sticking with good old-fashioned human decision-making, necessarily reduces accountability and increases the risk of bias. I tend to believe the opposite, that making processes algorithmic improves our ability to…