Category: Uncategorized
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Don't love the cyber bomb, but don't ignore it either
Cybersecurity is overblown – or not A recent report by Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins of George Mason University titled “Loving The Cyber Bomb? The Dangers Of Threat Inflation In Cybersecurity Policy” has gotten a bit of press. This is an important topic worthy of debate, but I believe their conclusions are incorrect. In this…
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Summary of W3C DNT Workshop Submissions
Last week, we hosted the W3C “Web Tracking and User Privacy” Workshop here at CITP (sponsored by Adobe, Yahoo!, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft). If you were not able to join us for this event, I hope to summarize some of the discussion embodied in the roughly 60 position papers submitted. The workshop attracted a wide…
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California to Consider Do Not Track Legislation
This afternoon the CA Senate Judiciary Committee had a brief time for proponents and opponents of SB 761 to speak about CA’s Do Not Track legislation. In general, the usual people said the usual things, with a few surprises along the way. Surprise 1: repeated discussion of privacy as a Constitutional right. For those of…
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Oak Ridge, spear phishing, and i-voting
Oak Ridge National Labs (one of the US national energy labs, along with Sandia, Livermore, Los Alamos, etc) had a bunch of people fall for a spear phishing attack (see articles in Computerworld and many other descriptions). For those not familiar with the term, spear phishing is sending targeted emails at specific recipients, designed to…
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Federating the "big four" computer security conferences
Last year, I wrote a report about rebooting the CS publication process (Tinker post, full tech report; an abbreviated version has been accepted to appear as a Communications of the ACM viewpoint article). I talked about how we might handle four different classes of research papers (“top papers” which get in without incident, “bubble papers”…
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Why seals can't secure elections
Over the last few weeks, I’ve described the chaotic attempts of the State of New Jersey to come up with tamper-indicating seals and a seal use protocol to secure its voting machines. A seal use protocol can allow the seal user to gain some assurance that the sealed material has not been tampered with. But…
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Building a better CA infrastructure
As several Tor project authors, Ben Adida and many others have written, our certificate authority infrastructure has the flaw that any one CA, anywhere on the planet, can issue a certificate for any web site, anywhere else on the planet. This was tolerable when the only game in town was VeriSign, but now that’s just…
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Do photo IDs help prevent vote fraud?
In many states, an ID is required to vote. The ostensible purpose is to prevent people from casting a ballot for someone else – dead or alive. Historically, it was also used to prevent poor and minority voters, who are less likely to have government IDs, from voting. No one would (publicly) admit to the…
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Google Should Stand up for Fair Use in Books Fight
On Tuesday Judge Denny Chen rejected a proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case. My write-up for Ars Technica is here. The question everyone is asking is what comes next. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the parties will go back to the bargaining table and hammer out a third iteration of the…
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A Legacy at Risk: How the new Ministry of Culture in Brazil reversed its digital agenda
Former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has become a prominent figure in the political world. When he completed his second and last term last December, 87% of Brazilians approved his government, an unprecedented high rate. So it is not surprising that his successor Dilma Roussef, the first woman elected president in Brazil, took…