Category: Uncategorized
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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.…
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Steve Schultze to Join CITP as Associate Director
I’m thrilled to announce that Steve Schultze will be joining the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, as our new Associate Director, starting September 15. We know Steve well, having followed his work as a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard, not to mention his collaboration with us on RECAP. Steve embodies the…
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The Trouble with PACER Fees
One sentiment I’ve seen in a number of people express about our release of RECAP is illustrated by this comment here at Freedom to Tinker: Technically impressive, but also shortsighted. There appears a socialistic cultural trend that seeks to disconnect individual accountability to ones choices. $.08 a page is hardly burdensome or profitable, and clearly…
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Introducing RECAP: Turning PACER Around
With today’s technologies, government transparency means much more than the chance to read one document at a time. Citizens today expect to be able to download comprehensive government datasets that are machine-processable, open and free. Unfortunately, government is much slower than industry when it comes to adopting new technologies. In recent years, private efforts have…
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Anonymization FAIL! Privacy Law FAIL!
I have uploaded my latest draft article entitled, Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization to SSRN (look carefully for the download button, just above the title; it’s a little buried). According to my abstract: Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for…
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Open Government Data: Starting to Judge the Results
Like many others who read this blog, I’ve spent some time over the last year trying to get more civic data online. I’ve argued that government’s failure to put machine-readable data online is the key roadblock that separates us from a world in which exciting, Web 2.0 style technologies enrich nearly every aspect of civic…