Category: Uncategorized
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New Internet? No Thanks.
Yesterday’s New York Times ran a piece, “Do We Need a New Internet?” suggesting that the Internet has too many security problems and should therefore be rebuilt. The piece has been widely criticized in the technical blogosphere, so there’s no need for me to pile on. Anyway, I have already written about the redesign-the-Net meme.…
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Final version of Government Data and the Invisible Hand
Thanks to the hard work of our patient editors at the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, my coauthors and I can now share the final version of our paper about online transparency, Government Data and the Invisible Hand. If you have read the first version, you know that our paper is informed by a…
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The Future of News: We're Lucky They Haven't Tried Macropayments
Regular readers will know that the newspaper industry is in dire shape: revenues off by 20% in just the last year, with more than 15,000 jobs lost in that period. This map tells the story better than any writing could. The market capitalizations of newspaper firms, which reflect investor expectations about future performance, have fallen…
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Rethinking the voting system certification process
Lawsuits! Everybody’s filing lawsuits. Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold) is suing SysTest, one of the EAC’s testing authorities (or, more properly, former testing authorities, now that the EAC is planning to suspend their accreditation). There’s also a lawsuit between the State of Ohio and Premier over whether or not Premier’s voting systems satisfy Ohio’s requirements.…
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Being Acquitted Versus Being Searched (YANAL)
With this post, I’m launching a new, (very) occasional series I’m calling YANAL, for “You Are Not A Lawyer.” In this series, I will try to disabuse computer scientists and other technically minded people of some commonly held misconceptions about the law (and the legal system). I start with something from criminal law. As you…
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New USACM Poilcy Recommendations on Open Government
USACM is the Washington policy committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, the professional association that represents computer scientists and computing practitioners. Today, USACM released Policy Recommendations on Open Government. The recommendations offer simple, clear advice to help Congress and the new administration make government initiatives—like the pending recovery bill—transparent to citizens. The leading recommendation…
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Obama's CTO: two positions?
Paul Blumenthal over at the Sunlight Foundation Blog points to a new report from the Congressional Research Service: “A Federal Chief Technology Officer in the Obama Administration: Option and Issues for Consideration”. This report does a good job of analyzing both existing positions in federal government that have roles that overlap with some of the…
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Please participate in research project — requires only one click
As part of a research project on web browser security we are currently taking a “census” of browser installations. We hope you’ll agree to participate. If you do participate, a small snippet of JavaScript will collect your browser’s settings and send them to our server. We will record a cryptographic hash of those settings in…
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New Site Tests Crowd-Sourced Transparency
Some of my colleagues here at CITP have written about the importance of open data formats for promoting government transparency and achieving government accountability. Another leading thinker in this area is my friend Jerry Brito, a George Mason University scholar who contributed a post here at Freedom to Tinker last year. Jerry wrote one of…
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District Court Ruling in MDY v. Blizzard
Today, an Arizona District Court issued its ruling in the MDY v. Blizzard case, which involves contract, copyright, and DMCA claims. The claims addressed at trial were fairly limited because the Court entered summary judgment on several claims last summer. In-court comments by lawyers suggest that the case is headed toward appeal in the Ninth…