CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Category: Other Topics

  • "Stolen" LinkedIn Profiles and the Misappropriation of Ideas

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    The common law tort of “hot news” misappropriation has been dying a slow and justified death. Hot news misappropriation is the legal doctrine on which news outlets like the Associated Press have repeatedly relied over the years to try to prevent third-party dissemination of factual information gathered at the outlets’ expense. Last June, the Second…

  • Applications and Appliances: A Conversation with Jonathan Zittrain

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    Professor Jonathan Zittrain is well-known for his concern that the general-purpose computer may be disappearing. The recent rise of app stores is putting his fears in a new light. After trading some thoughts about the issues in the blogosphere, he and I sat down at our respective keyboards for a conversation about the future of…

  • ACM opens another hole in the paywall

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    Last month I wrote about Princeton University’s new open-access policy. In fact, Princeton’s policy just recognizes where many disciplines and many scholarly publishers were going already. Most of the important publication venues in Computer Science already have an open-access policy–that is, their standard author copyright contract permits an author to make copies of his or…

  • Appeal filed in NJ voting-machines lawsuit

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    Paperless (DRE) voting machines went on trial in New Jersey in 2009, in the Gusciora v. Corzine lawsuit. In early 2010 Judge Linda Feinberg issued an Opinion that was flawed in many ways (factually and legally). But Judge Feinberg did at least recognize that DRE voting machines are vulnerable to software-based election fraud, and she…

  • What happens when the printed ballot face doesn't match the electronic ballot definition?

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    Part 4 of 4. Complete 4-part series available here. The Sequoia AVC Advantage is an old-technology direct-recording electronic voting machine. It doesn’t have a video display; the candidate names are printed on a large sheet of paper, and voters indicate their choices by pressing buttons that are underneath the paper. A “ballot definition” file in…

  • Will the NJ Attorney General investigate the NJ Attorney General?

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    Part 3 of 4 In my recent posts I wrote about my discovery that (apparently) a County employee tampered with evidence in a computer that the NJ Superior Court had Ordered the County to present for examination. I described this discovery to the Court (Judge David E. Krell); and then a County employee did admit…

  • Did NJ election officials fail to respect court order to improve security of elections?

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    Part 2 of 4 The Gusciora case was filed in 2004 by the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic on behalf of Reed Gusciora and other public-interest plaintiffs. The Plaintiffs sought to end the use of paperless direct-recording electronic voting machines, which are very vulnerable to fraud and manipulation via replacement of their software. The defendant was…

  • NJ election cover-up

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    Part 1 of 4 During the June 2011 New Jersey primary election, something went wrong in Cumberland County, which uses Sequoia AVC Advantage direct-recording electronic voting computers. From this we learned several things: New Jersey court-ordered election-security measures have not been effectively implemented. There is a reason to believe that New Jersey election officials have…

  • Google+Motorola = Software Patent Indictment

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    Google’s announcement this morning that it had agreed to purchase Motorola Mobility for $12.5Billion sent MMI’s stock price soaring and set off another conversation about software patents and the smart-phone ecosystem. Larry Page himself emphasized the patent angle of the merger in the corporate blog post: We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple…

  • Yet again, why banking online .NE. voting online

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    One of the most common questions I get is “if I can bank online, why can’t I vote online”. A recently released (but undated) document ”Supplement to Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment” from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council addresses some of the risks of online banking. Krebs on Security has a nice writeup…