Category: Other Topics
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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…
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Apple/FBI: Freedom of speech vs. compulsion to sign
This week I signed the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief in the Apple/FBI iPhone-unlocking lawsuit. Many prominent computer scientists and cryptographers signed: Josh Aas, Hal Abelson, Judy Anderson, Andrew Appel, Tom Ball (the Google one, not the Microsoft one), Boaz Barak, Brian Behlendorf, Rich Belgard, Dan Bernstein, Matt Bishop, Josh Bloch, Fred Brooks, Mark Davis,…
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VW = Voting Wulnerability
On Friday, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “accused the German automaker of using software to detect when the car is undergoing its periodic state emissions testing. Only during such tests are the cars’ full emissions control systems turned on. During normal driving situations, the controls are turned off, allowing the cars to spew as…
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Freedom to Tinker on the Radio
Today on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s CBC Radio show, “The Current”, a 20-minute segment about the freedom to tinker: “Arrested, for tinkering. Young Ahmed Mohamed likes to take things apart, cross wires, experiment… and put things back together again. It’s the kind of hobby that once led to companies like…say, Apple and Microsoft. But is…
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Voting Every Day: Smartphones, Civil Rights and Civic Participation
The process of influencing government action has undergone a significant transformation in the age of the smartphone. Of course, the traditional lobbying business continues to thrive, with companies, trade associations and public interest advocacy groups relying on experienced experts to plead their cases in Washington, DC, and throughout the country. What the smartphone has done,…
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How not to measure security
A recent paper published by Smartmatic, a vendor of voting systems, caught my attention. The first thing is that it’s published by Springer, which typically publishes peer-reviewed articles – which this is not. This is a marketing piece. It’s disturbing that a respected imprint like Springer would get into the business of publishing vendor white…
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Decertifying the worst voting machine in the US
On Apr 14 2015, the Virginia State Board of Elections immediately decertified use of the AVS WinVote touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine. This seems pretty minor, but it received a tremendous amount of pushback from some local election officials. In this post, I’ll explain how we got to that point, and what the…