Category: Privacy & Security
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My Work at Princeton: Mobile Technology, Community Building and Civic Engagement
I’m excited to spend my year as a Fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy exploring and testing ideas about how broadband technology – particularly mobile wireless services – can and should be used to build strong local communities. I have always been interested in how seemingly simple improvements to the existing way of…
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Unlocking Hidden Consensus in Legislatures
A legislature is a small group with a big impact. Even for people who will never be part of one, the mechanics of a legislature matter — when they work well, we all benefit, and when they work poorly, we all lose out. At the same time, with several hundred participants, legislatures are large enough…
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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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Goodbye, Stanford. Hello, Princeton!
[Editor’s note: The Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) is delighted to welcome Arvind Narayanan as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science, and an affiliated faculty member in CITP. Narayanan is a leading researcher in digital privacy, data anonymization, and technology policy. His work has been widely published, and includes a paper with CITP co-authors…
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Privacy Threat Model for Mobile
Evaluating privacy vulnerabilities in the mobile space can be a difficult and ad hoc process for developers, publishers, regulators, and researchers. This is due, in significant part, to the absence of a well-developed and widely accepted privacy threat model. With 1 million UDIDs posted on the Internet this past week, there is an urgent need…
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The Decline of DVD-by-Mail, or Further Thoughts on the Digital Death of Copyright's First Sale Doctrine
Netflix reported a second-quarter profit last week as customer demand continues to drive a transition in the company’s primary delivery model from DVD-by-mail to Internet streaming. According to The New York Times, “he company’s net losses among DVD-by-mail subscriptions outpaced its gains in net streaming subscriptions in the United States, reflecting the continued challenge of…
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Open Internet Advisory Committee kick-off
Last Friday, we had the first meeting of the Open Internet Advisory Committee (OIAC), called for by the FCC in the recent Open Internet Order. The members of the OIAC consist of a mix of folks from venture capital firms, ISPs, governance organizations, community organizations, and academics like myself. The OIAC’s mission is to “track and evaluate…
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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…