Category: Privacy & Security
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Going to the doctor and worrying about cybersecurity
For most people, going to the doctor means thinking about co-pays and when they’ll feel better. For me though, it means thinking about those plus the cyber security of the computer systems being used by the medical professionals. I’ve spent more time than usual visiting doctors recently. I broke my hand – sure I’ll tell…
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My Public Comments to the CA/Browser Forum Organizational Reform Working Group
Today, I submitted public comments to the CA/Browser Forum. CA/B Forum is an industry group started by Certificate Authorities — the companies that sell digital certificates to web sites so that your browser can encrypt your communications and can tell you whether it’s connecting to the genuine site. It is important that CAs do a…
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Brazil is the only BRIC country standing ground on Internet Freedom. Here is why.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a piece covering a new report launched by OECD calling member-countries to “promote and protect the global free flow of information”. The article lists three BRIC-members, China, India and Russia, as examples of countries taking actions harmful to online freedom. One BRIC member is missing from…
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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…