Category: Other Topics
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Neophilia and Human Nature
In the spring of 2012, I attended the memorial service for John McCarthy, a computer science founding father, at an auditorium on the Stanford campus. Among the great and good anecdotes told about this great and good guy was the mention of how McCarthy, more or less in around 1961, invented time-sharing—which, as was pointed…
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Open Review leads to better books
My book manuscript, Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age, is now in Open Review. That means that while the book manuscript goes through traditional peer review, I also posted it online for a parallel Open Review. During the Open Review everyone—not just traditional peer reviewers—can read the manuscript and help make it…
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My testimony before the House Subcommittee on IT
I was invited to testify yesterday before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Information Technology, at a hearing entitled “Cybersecurity: Ensuring the Integrity of the Ballot Box.” My written testimony is available here. My 5-minute opening statement went as follows: My name is Andrew Appel. I am Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. …
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Which voting machines can be hacked through the Internet?
Over 9000 jurisdictions (counties and states) in the U.S. run elections with a variety of voting machines: optical scanners for paper ballots, and direct-recording “touchscreen” machines. Which ones of them can be hacked to make them cheat, to transfer votes from one candidate to another? The answer: all of them. An attacker with physical access…
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All the News That’s Fit to Change: Insights into a corpus of 2.5 million news headlines
[Thanks to Joel Reidenberg for encouraging this deeper dive into news headlines!] There is no guarantee that a news headline you see online today will not change tomorrow, or even in the next hour, or will even be the same headlines your neighbor sees right now. For a real-life example of the type of change…
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Security against Election Hacking – Part 1: Software Independence
There’s been a lot of discussion of whether the November 2016 U.S. election can be hacked. Should the U.S. Government designate all the states’ and counties’ election computers as “critical cyber infrastructure” and prioritize the “cyberdefense” of these systems? Will it make any difference to activate those buzzwords with less than 3 months until the…
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A response to the National Association of Secretaries of State
Election administration in the United States is largely managed state-by-state, with a small amount of Federal involvement. This generally means that each state’s chief election official is that state’s Secretary of State. Their umbrella organization, the National Association of Secretaries of State, consequently has a lot of involvement in voting issues, and recently issued a…
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Supplement for Revealing Algorithmic Rankers (Table 1)
Table 1: A ranking of Computer Science departments per csrankings.org, with additional attributes from the NRC assessment dataset. Here, the average count computes the geometric mean of the adjusted number of publications in each area by institution, faculty is the number of faculty in the department, pubs is the average number of publications per faculty…
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Pokémon Go and The Law: Privacy, Intellectual Property, and Other Legal Concerns
Pokémon Go made 22-year-old Kyrie Tompkins fall and twist her ankle. “[The game] vibrated to let me know there was something nearby and I looked up and just fell in a hole,” she told local news outlet WHEC 10. So far, no one has sued Niantic or The Pokémon Company for injuries suffered while playing…
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Internet Voting? Really?
Recently I gave a TEDx talk—I spoke at the local Princeton University TEDx event. My topic was voting: America’s voting systems in the 19th and 20th century, and should we vote using the Internet? You can see the talk here:
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Internet Voting, Utah GOP Primary Election
Utah’s Republican presidential primary was conducted today by Internet. If you have your voter-registration PIN, or even if you don’t, visit https://ivotingcenter.gop and you will learn something about Internet voting!
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Apple, FBI, and Software Transparency
The Apple versus FBI showdown has quickly become a crucial flashpoint of the “new Crypto War.” On February 16 the FBI invoked the All Writs Act of 1789, a catch-all authority for assistance of law enforcement, demanding that Apple create a custom version of its iOS to help the FBI decrypt an iPhone used by one of the San…