Category: Uncategorized
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The Gizmodo Warrant: Searching Journalists in the Terabyte Age
Last Friday night, police officers in California used a warrant to search the home of Jason Chen, the Gizmodo blogger who wrote about the iPhone prototype found in a Redwood City bar. Orin Kerr has written an interesting post assessing the legality of the search. I wanted to touch on an important issue he didn’t…
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Needle-in-a-Haystack Problems, and P vs. NP
Last week I wrote about needle-in-a-haystack problems, in which it’s hard to find the solution but if somebody tells you the solution it’s easy to verify. A commenter asked whether such problems are related to the P vs. NP problem, which is the most important unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. It turns out that…
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Needle-in-a-Haystack Problems
Sometimes the same idea comes flying at you from several directions at once, and you start seeing that idea everywhere. This has been happening to me lately with needle-in-a-haystack problems, a concept that is useful but often goes unrecognized. A needle-in-a-haystack problem is a problem where the right answer is very difficult to determine in…
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Release Government Data, Early and Often
One of the key axioms of modern open government is that all public data should be published online in a raw but usable form. Usability in this case is aimed at software programmers. By making government datasets more usable, programmers are more likely to innovate in the civic sphere and build technologies, using the raw…
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April 27 Workshop at Princeton CITP: Internet Security, Internet Freedom
On April 27th, the Center for Information Technology Policy is hosting a one-day workshop on campus here at Princeton. We invite you to attend. Here is the summary of the event, called Internet Security, Internet Freedom: The internet is at once a means for great openness and great control — expression and exclusion. These forces…
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Flash, Scratch, Ajax: Apple's War on Programming
Any ambitious regulatory scheme will face pressure to expand, in order to protect the flanks of the main regulation against users’ workarounds. Apple’s strategy of regulating which apps can run on the iPhone and iPod is just such a regulation, and over the last week or so Apple has been giving in to the pressure…
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What Open Data Means to Marginalized Communities
Two symbols of this era of open data are President Obama’s Open Governance Initiative, a directive that has led agencies to post their results online and open up data sets, and Ushahidi, a tool for crowdsourcing crisis information. While these tools are bringing openness to governance and crisis response respectively, I believe we have yet…
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iPad: The Disneyland of Computers
Tech commentators have a love/hate relationship with Apple’s new iPad. Those who try it tend to like it, but many dislike its locked-down App Store which only allows Apple-approved apps. Some people even see the iPad as the dawn of a new relationship between people and computers. To me, the iPad is Disneyland. I like…
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CITP Expands Scope of RECAP
Today, we’re thrilled to announce the next version of our RECAP technology, dramatically expanding the scope of the project. Having had some modest success at providing public access to legal documents, we’re now taking the next logical step, offering easy public access to illegal documents. The Internet Archive, which graciously hosts RECAP’s repository of legal…
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CITP is a Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentoring Organization
The Google Summer of Code program provides student stipends for summer work on open source projects. CITP is thrilled to have been chosen as a mentoring organization for 2010, meaning that students will be working on some CITP projects this summer. We think that these projects are very interesting, and potential participants now have the…