Category: Privacy & Security
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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…
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"You Might Also Like:" Privacy Risks of Collaborative Filtering
Ann Kilzer, Arvind Narayanan, Ed Felten, Vitaly Shmatikov, and I have released a new research paper detailing the privacy risks posed by collaborative filtering recommender systems. To examine the risk, we use public data available from Hunch, LibraryThing, Last.fm, and Amazon in addition to evaluating a synthetic system using data from the Netflix Prize dataset.…
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Web Tracking and User Privacy Workshop: Test Cases for Privacy on the Web
This guest post is from Nick Doty, of the W3C and UC Berkeley School of Information. As a companion post to my summary of the position papers submitted for last month’s W3C Do-Not-Track Workshop, hosted by CITP, Nick goes deeper into the substance and interaction during the workshop. The level of interest and participation in…
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Overstock's $1M Challenge
As reported in Fast Company, RichRelevance and Overstock.com teamed up to offer up to a $1,000,000 prize for improving “its recommendation engine by 10 percent or more.” If You Liked Netflix, You Might Also Like Overstock When I first read a summary of this contest, it appeared they were following in Netflix’s footsteps right down…
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In DHS Takedown Frenzy, Mozilla Refuses to Delete MafiaaFire Add-On
Not satisfied with seizing domain names, the Department of Homeland Security asked Mozilla to take down the MafiaaFire add-on for Firefox. Mozilla, through its legal counsel Harvey Anderson, refused. Mozilla deserves thanks and credit for a principled stand for its users’ rights. MafiaaFire is a quick plugin, as its author describes, providing redirection service for…