Category: Uncategorized
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Basic Data Format Lessons
[This is the second post in a series on best practices for government datasets by Harlan Yu and me. (previous post)] When creating a dataset, the preferences of developers may not be obvious to those producing the dataset. Seemingly innocuous choices by data providers can lead to major headaches for developers. In this post, we…
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Government Datasets That Facilitate Innovation
[This is the first post in a series on best practices for government datasets by Harlan Yu and me.] There’s a growing consensus that the government can increase its openness and transparency by publishing its raw data in bulk online. As several Freedom to Tinker contributors argued in Government Data and the Invisible Hand, publishing…
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Web Certification Fail: Bad Assumptions Lead to Bad Technology
It should be abundantly clear, from two recent posts here, that the current model for certifying the identity of web sites is deeply flawed. When you connect to a web site, and your browser displays an https URL and a happy lock or key icon indicating a secure connection, the odds that you’re connecting to…
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Google Buzzkill
The launch of Google Buzz, the new social networking service tied to GMail, was a fiasco to say the least. Its default settings exposed people’s e-mail contacts in frightening ways with serious privacy and human rights implications. Evgeny Morozov, who specializes in analyzing how authoritarian regimes use the Internet, put it bluntly last Friday in…
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The Engine of Job Growth? Tracking SBA-backed Loans Through Recovery.gov
Last week at a Town Hall Meeting in New Hampshire, President Obama stated that “we’re going to start where most new jobs start—with small businesses,” and he encouraged Congress to transfer $30 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to a new program called the Small Business Lending Fund. As this proposal was unveiled, the…
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CITP Seeks Visiting Faculty, Scholars or Policy Experts for 2010-2011
The Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University seeks candidates for positions as visiting faculty members or researchers, or postdoctoral research associates for the 2010-2011 academic year. About CITP Digital technologies and public life are constantly reshaping each other—from net neutrality and broadband adoption, to copyright and file sharing, to electronic voting and…
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iPad to Test Zittrain's "Future of the Internet" Thesis
Jonathan Zittrain famously argued in his book “The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It” that we were headed for a future in which general purpose computers would be replaced by locked-down computing appliances. Apple’s new iPad will put Zittrain’s thesis to the test. The iPad, as announced, has aspects of both an…
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Census of Files Available via BitTorrent
BitTorrent is popular because it lets anyone distribute large files at low cost. Which kinds of files are available on BitTorrent? Sauhard Sahi, a Princeton senior, decided to find out. Sauhard’s independent work last semester, under my supervision, set out to measure what was available on BitTorrent. This post, summarizing his results, was co-written by…
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Information Technology Policy in the Obama Administration, One Year In
[Last year, I wrote an essay for Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, summarizing the technology policy challenges facing the incoming Obama Administration. This week they published my follow-up essay, looking back on the Administration’s first year. Here it is.] Last year I identified four information technology policy challenges facing the incoming Obama Administration: improving cybersecurity, making…
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Software in dangerous places
Software increasingly manages the world around us, in subtle ways that are often hard to see. Software helps fly our airplanes (in some cases, particularly military fighter aircraft, software is the only thing keeping them in the air). Software manages our cars (fuel/air mixture, among other things). Software manages our electrical grid. And, closer to…