Category: Privacy & Security
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First Principles for Fostering Civic Engagement via Digital Technologies: #1 Know Your Community
Over the first few months of my Fellowship at CITP, I have had the pleasure of meeting with a number of people from academia, non-profits, for-profit companies and government to discuss the role of digital technologies in fostering civic engagement. In a series of blog posts, I plan to set out ten principles that local…
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The State of Connectivity in Latin America: from Mobile Phones to Tablets
Ten years ago, issues like e-health, e-education and e-government were more products of wishful thinking than ideas with a real possibility of being implemented in most Latin American countries. Conversely, the present moment has become a turning point for the region in terms of connectivity. Government policies, markets and non-profit initiatives are contributing to improve…
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Basic Economics of Bitcoin Mining
Arvind wrote yesterday about the availability of chips that do super-fast Bitcoin mining. I want to follow up by unpacking the economics of Bitcoin mining, to see what the effect of the new chips will be, and more generally what the future of Bitcoin mining looks like.
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Bitcoin grows up, gets its own hardware
The big news in the Bitcoin world is that there are several Bitcoin-mining ASICs (custom chips) already shipping or about to be launched. Avalon in particular has been getting some attention recently. Bitcoin mining moved long ago from CPUs to GPUs, but this takes it one step further. The expectation is that very soon most…
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Oral arguments in NJ voting-machines lawsuit appeal
The appellate hearing (oral argument) of the New Jersey voting-machines lawsuit (Gusciora v. Christie) has been rescheduled to March 5, 2013 in Trenton, NJ. To learn what this is all about, and why you should attend, click here. To recheck the location, time of day, and date of the hearing before you go down to…
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Are genomes "anonymous data"?
Recently researchers showed that an unknown person’s genome (i.e., the genetic information stored in their DNA) can often be linked to their identity. The researchers used the genome plus some publicly available information to link this information. Just as interesting as the result itself is the way that people talked about it. As an example,…
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FCC Open Internet Advisory Committee Progress
Earlier this year, I wrote about the launch of the Open Internet Advisory Committee (OIAC). The committee’s mandate is to, “track and evaluate the effect of the FCC’s Open Internet rules, and to provide any recommendations it deems appropriate to the FCC regarding policies and practices related to preserving the open Internet.” I’m chairing the…
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How the Nokia Browser Decrypts SSL Traffic: A "Man in the Client"
Over the past couple of days there has been some press coverage over security researcher Guarang Pandya’s report that the browser on his Nokia phone was sending all of his traffic to Nokia proxy servers, including his HTTPS traffic. The disturbing part of his report was evidence that Nokia is not just proxying, but actually…
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Predictions for 2013
After a year’s hiatus, our annual predictions post is back! As usual, these predictions reflect the results of brainstorming among many affiliates and friends of the blog, so you should not attribute any prediction to any individual (including me–I’m just the scribe). Without further ado, the tech policy predictions for 2013:
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Turktrust Certificate Authority Errors Demonstrate The Risk of "Subordinate" Certificates
Update: More details have continued to come out, and I think that they generally support the less-paranoid version of events. There continues to be discussion on the mozilla.dev.security.policy list, Turktrust has given more details, and Mozilla has just opened up for public viewing their own detailed internal response documentation (including copies of all of the…