Category: Uncategorized
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Introducing FedThread: Opening the Federal Register
Today we are rolling out FedThread, a new way of interacting with the Federal Register. It’s the latest civic technology project from our team at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. The Federal Register is “[t]he official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders…
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Antisocial networking
I just got my invitation to Google Wave. The prototype that’s now public doesn’t have all of the amazing features in the original video demos. At this point, it’s pretty much just a way of collecting IM-style conversations all in one place. But several of my friends are already there, and I’ve had a few…
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Breaking Vanish: A Story of Security Research in Action
Today, seven colleagues and I released a new paper, “Defeating Vanish with Low-Cost Sybil Attacks Against Large DHTs”. The paper’s authors are Scott Wolchok (Michigan), Owen Hofmann (Texas), Nadia Heninger (Princeton), me, Alex Halderman (Michigan), Christopher Rossbach (Texas), Brent Waters (Texas), and Emmett Witchel (Texas). Our paper is the next chapter in an interesting story…
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Netflix's Impending (But Still Avoidable) Multi-Million Dollar Privacy Blunder
In my last post, I had promised to say more about my article on the limits of anonymization and the power of reidentification. Although I haven’t said anything for a few weeks, others have, and I especially appreciate posts by Susannah Fox, Seth Schoen, and Nate Anderson. Not only have these people summarized my article…
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Improving the Government's User Interface
The White House’s attempts to gather input from citizens have hit some bumps, wrote Anand Giridharadas recently in the New York Times. This administration has done far more than its predecessors to let citizens provide input directly to government via the Internet, but they haven’t always received the input they expected. Giridharadas writes: During the…
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NY Times Should Report on NY Times Ad Malware
Yesterday morning, while reading the New York Times online, I was confronted with an attempted security attack, apparently delivered through an advertisement. A window popped up, mimicking an antivirus scanner. After “scanning” my computer, it reported finding viruses and invited me to download a free antivirus scanner. The displays implied, without quite saying so, that…
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Consolidation in E-Voting Market: ES&S Buys Premier
Yesterday Diebold sold its e-voting division, known as Premier Election Systems, to ES&S, one of Premier’s competitors. The price was low: about $5 million. ES&S is reportedly the largest e-voting company, and Premier was the second-largest, so the deal represents a substantial consolidation in the market. The odds of one major e-voting company breaking from…
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Finding and Fixing Errors in Google's Book Catalog
There was a fascinating exchange about errors in Google’s book catalog over at the Language Log recently. We rarely see such an open and constructive discussion of errors in large data sets, so this is an unusual opportunity to learn about how errors arise and what can be done about them. The exchange started with…
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When spammers try to go legitimate
I hate to sound like a broken record, complaining about professional mail distribution / spam-houses that are entirely unwilling to require their customers to follow a strict opt-in discipline. But I’m going to complain again and I’m going to name names. Today, I got a spam touting a Citrix product (“Free virtualization training for you…
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Subpoenas and Search Warrants as Security Threats
When I teach computer security, one of the first lessons is on the need to have a clear threat model, that is, a clearly defined statement of which harms you are trying to prevent, and what assumptions you are making about the capabilities and motivation of the adversaries who are trying to cause those harms.…