Category: Privacy & Security
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Researchers Show How to Forge Site Certificates
Today at the Chaos Computing Congress, a group of researchers (Alex Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jake Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, Benne de Weger, and David Molnar) announced that they have found a way to forge website certificates that will be accepted as valid by most browsers. This means that they can successfully impersonate any website, even for…
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Security Seals on AVC Advantage Voting Machines are Easily Defeated
On September 2, 2008, I submitted a report to the New Jersey Superior Court, demonstrating that the DRE voting machines used in New Jersey are insecure: it is easy to replace the vote-counting program with one that fraudulently shifts votes from one candidate to another. In Section 10 of my report, I explained that There…
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Three Flavors of Net Neutrality
When the Wall Street Journal claimed on Monday that Google was secretly backtracking on its net neutrality position, commentators were properly skeptical. Tim Lee (among others) argued that the Journal misunderstood what net neutrality means, and others pointed out gaps in the Journal’s reasoning — not to mention that the underlying claim about Google’s actions…
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Watching Google's Gatekeepers
Google’s legal team has extraordinary power to decide which videos can be seen by audiences around the world, according to Jeffrey Rosen’s piece, Google’s Gatekeepers in yesterday’s New York Times magazine. Google, of course, owns YouTube, which gives it the technical ability to block particular videos — though of course so many videos are submitted…
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Economic Growth, Censorship, and Search Engines
Economic growth depends on an ability to access relevant information. Although censorship prevents access to certain information, the direct consequences of censorship are well-known and somewhat predictable. For example, blocking access to Falun Gong literature is unlikely to harm a country’s consumer electronics industry. On the web, however, information of all types is interconnected. Blocking…
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Does Your House Need a Tail?
Thus far, the debate over broadband deployment has generally been between those who believe that private telecom incumbents should be in charge of planning, financing and building next-generation broadband infrastructure, and those who advocate a larger role for government in the deployment of broadband infrastructure. These proposals include municipal-owned networks and a variety of subsidies…
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Low Hit Rate Isn't the Problem with TSA Screening
The TSA, which oversees U.S. airport security, comes in for a lot of criticism — much of it deserved. But sometimes commentators let their dislike for the TSA get the better of them, and they offer critiques that don’t stand up logically. A good example is yesterday’s USA Today article on TSA’s behavioral screening program,…
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Can Google Flu Trends Be Manipulated?
Last week researchers from Google and the Centers for Disease Control unveiled a cool new research result, showing that they could gauge the level of influenza infections in a region of the U.S. by seeing how often people in those regions did Google searches for certain terms related to the flu and flu symptoms. The…
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Abandoning the Envelope Analogy (What Your Mailman Knows Part 2)
Last time, I commented on NPR’s story about a mail carrier named Andrea in Seattle who can tell us something about the economic downturn by revealing private facts about the people she serves on her mail route. By critiquing the decision to run the story, I drew a few lessons about the way people value…
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What Your Mailman Knows (Part 1 of 2)
A few days ago, National Public Radio (NPR) tried to offer some lighter fare to break up the death march of gloomier stories about economic calamity. You can listen to the story online. The story’s reporter, Chana Joffe-Walt, followed a mail carrier named Andrea on her route around the streets of Seattle. The premise of…