Category: Privacy & Security
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Search Neutrality ? Net Neutrality
Sunday’s New York Times featured a provocative op-ed arguing in addition to regulating “net neutrality” the FCC should also effectuate “search neutrality” – requiring search providers rank results without consideration of business entities. The author heaps particular scorn upon Google for promoting its own context-relevant services (i.e. maps and weather) at the fore of search…
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Another Privacy Misstep from Facebook
Facebook is once again clashing with its users over privacy. As a user myself, I was pretty unhappy about the recently changed privacy control. I felt that Facebook was trying to trick me into loosening controls on my information. Though the initial letter from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg painted the changes as pro-privacy — which…
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The Role of Worst Practices in Insecurity
These days, security advisors talk a lot about Best Practices: establishes procedures that are generally held to yield good results. Deploy Best Practices in your organization, the advisors say, and your security will improve. That’s true, as far as it goes, but often we can make more progress by working to eliminate Worst Practices. A…
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Election Day; More Unguarded Voting Machines
It’s Election Day in New Jersey. As usual, I visited several polling places in Princeton over the last few days, looking for unguarded voting machines. It’s been well demonstrated that a bad actor who can get physical access to a New Jersey voting machine can modify its behavior to steal votes, so an unguarded voting…
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Sequoia Announces Voting System with Published Code
Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the major e-voting companies, announced Tuesday that it will publish all of the source code for its forthcoming Frontier product. This is great news–an important step toward the kind of transparency that is necessary to make today’s voting systems trustworthy. To be clear, this will not be a fully open…
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Net Neutrality: When is Network Management "Reasonable"?
Last week the FCC released its much-awaited Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on network neutrality. As expected, the NPRM affirms past FCC neutrality principles, and adds two more. Here’s the key language: 1. Subject to reasonable network management, a provider of broadband Internet access service may not prevent any of its users from sending or…
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Android Open Source Model Has a Short Circuit
[Update: Google subsequently worked out a mechanism that allows Cyanogen and others to distribute their mods separate from the Google Apps.] Last year, Google entered the mobile phone market with a Linux-based mobile operating system. The company brought together device manufacturers and carriers in the Open Handset Alliance, explaining that, “Together we have developed Android™,…
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The Markey Net Neutrality Bill: Least Restrictive Network Management?
It’s an exciting time in the net neutrality debate. FCC Chairman Jules Genachowski’s speech on Monday promised a new FCC proceeding that will aim to create a formal rule to replace the Commission’s existing policy statement. Meanwhile, net neutrality advocates in Congress are pondering new legislation for two reasons: First, there is a debate about…
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U.S. Objects to China's Mandatory Green Dam Censorware
Yesterday, the U.S. Commerce Secretary and Trade Representative sent a letter to China’s government, objecting to China’s order, effective July 1, to require that all new PCs sold in China have preinstalled the Green Dam Youth Escort censorware program. Here’s today’s New York Times: Chinese officials have said that the filtering software, known as Green…
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China's New Mandatory Censorware Creates Big Security Flaws
Today Scott Wolchok, Randy Yao, and Alex Halderman at the University of Michigan released a report analyzing Green Dam, the censorware program that the Chinese government just ordered installed on all new computers in China. The researchers found that Green Dam creates very serious security vulnerabilities on users’ computers. The report starts with a summary…