Author: Stephen Schultze
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Tim Lee Reporting on NJ Email-Assisted Voting
Earlier this week, Professor Andrew Appel posted that “NJ Lt. Governor invites voters to submit invalid ballots“. Andrew has been offering updates at the bottom of his post since then. Professor Ed Felten also summarized the state of “New Jersey Voting in the Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy,” concluding that, “I would strongly oppose any long-term…
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Get Out the Vote, Cee-Lo Style?
This semester, Ed Felten and I are teaching a Freshman Seminar called “Facebook: The Social Impact of Social Networks.” This week, the class is discussing a recent article published in the journal Nature, entitled “A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization“. The study reveals that if Facebook shows you a list of your…
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"E-Voting: Risk and Opportunity" Live Stream Tomorrow at 1:30pm Eastern
Despite the challenges due to Hurricane Sandy earlier this week, the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton is still hosting “E-Voting: Risk and Opportunity,” a live streamed symposium on the state and future of voting technology. At 1:30pm (Eastern) on November 1, 2012, electronic voting experts from across the United States will discuss what…
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Supreme Court to Hear State Freedom of Information Act Case "McBurney v. Young"
On Friday, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to McBurney v. Young. This case formally concerns the “Privileges and Immunities Clause” of the Constitution. It raises questions about what access rights citizens have to government records and about who counts as a journalist. Oral argument will likely be scheduled for 2013. Mark McBurney is a citizen…
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Sloppy Reporting on the "University Personal Records" Data Breach by the New York Times Bits Blog
This morning I ran across a distressing headline while perusing my RSS feeds. The New York Times’ Bits Blog proclaimed that, “Hackers Breach 53 Universities and Dump Thousands of Personal Records Online.” I clicked, and was informed that: Hackers published online Monday thousands of personal records from 53 universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, Johns…
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CITP Welcomes This Year's Fellows
The 2012-2013 academic year is well underway, and the Center for Information Technology Policy is buzzing with fellows and departmental guests. Look forward to their posts here on Freedom to Tinker in the days and weeks to come, and read their full bios on the CITP site.
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Is Spotify the Celestial Jukebox for Music?
In 1994, law professor Paul Goldstein popularized the term “celestial jukebox” to refer to his vision of a networked database of consumable on-demand media. In the face of copyright law that was ill-suited to the rapid rate of technological change, he described a system in which consumers would pay-per-play rather than purchasing and owning individual…
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Firefox Changes its HTTPS User Interface… Again
A year and a half ago, I wrote about major changes to the way that Firefox indicates whether the connection to a web site is encrypted. I noted that, especially with the emergence of mobile browsers, the traditional “padlock icon” of standard SSL-secured connections and the “green glow” of Extended Validation was being implemented in…
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I Tell the FCC to End In-Home Video Encryption
In my last post, I asked “Who Killed the Open Set-Top-Box?.” There were some great comments on that post, which inspired me to write up my thoughts and send them to the FCC. The FCC has long tried and failed to mandate that cable companies make their systems more interoperable with third-party consumer devices. Nevertheless,…
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Who Killed the Open Set-Top-Box?
A few years ago, I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I subscribed to Comcast cable. With my trusty Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 I enjoyed the ability to watch TV on my desktop computer — even to record it for later viewing or to occasionally edit and re-upload it to YouTube (with critical commentary and within the bounds of…