Category: Privacy & Security
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Applications and Appliances: A Conversation with Jonathan Zittrain
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…
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Stopping SOPA's Anticircumvention
The House’s Stop Online Piracy Act is in Judiciary Committee Markup today. As numerous protests, open letters, and advocacy campaigns across the Web, this is a seriously flawed bill. Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Darell Issa’s proposed OPEN Act points out, by contrast, some of the procedural problems. Here, I analyze just one of the…
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Don't Regulate the Internet. No, Wait. Regulate the Internet.
When Congress considered net neutrality legislation in the form of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 (H.R. 5353), representatives of corporate copyright owners weighed in to oppose government regulation of the Internet. They feared that such regulation might inhibit their private efforts to convince ISPs to help them enforce copyrights online through various forms…
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Crowdsourcing State Secrets
Those who regularly listen to Fresh Air may have heard a recent interview with journalist Dana Priest about the dramatic expansion of the intelligence community over the past ten years. The guest mentioned how the government had paid contractors several times what their own intelligence officials would be paid to perform the same analysis tasks.…
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Did NJ election officials fail to respect court order to improve security of elections?
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…
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DigiNotar Hack Highlights the Critical Failures of our SSL Web Security Model
This past week, the Dutch company DigiNotar admitted that their servers were hacked in June of 2011. DigiNotar is no ordinary company, and this was no ordinary hack. DigiNotar is one of the “certificate authorities” that has been entrusted by web browsers to certify to users that they are securely connecting to web sites. Without…
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Telex and Ethan Zuckerman's "Cute Cat Theory" of Internet Censorship
A few years ago, Ethan Zuckerman gave a talk at CITP on his “cute cat theory” of internet censorship (see also NY Times article), which goes something like this: Most internet users use the internet and social media tools for harmless activities, like looking at pictures of kittens online. However, an open social media site…
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Anticensorship in the Internet's Infrastructure
I’m pleased to announce a research result that Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and I have been working on for the past 18 months: Telex, a new approach to circumventing state-level Internet censorship. Telex is markedly different from past anticensorship efforts, and we believe it has the potential to shift the balance of power…
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Supreme Court Takes Important GPS Tracking Case
This morning, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal next term of United States v. Jones (formerly United States v. Maynard), a case in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals suppressed evidence of a criminal defendant’s travels around town, which the police collected using a tracking device they attached to his car. For…
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Deceptive Assurances of Privacy?
Earlier this week, Facebook expanded the roll-out of its facial recognition software to tag people in photos uploaded to the social networking site. Many observers and regulators responded with privacy concerns; EFF offered a video showing users how to opt-out. Tim O’Reilly, however, takes a different tack: Face recognition is here to stay. My question…