CITP Blog is hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.
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As I’m writing this, the eye of Hurricane Ike is roughly ten hours from landfall. The weather here, maybe 60 miles inland, is overcast with mild wind. Meanwhile, the storm…
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Preparing for a natural disaster
As Tinker readers may know, I live in Houston, Texas, and we’ve got Hurricane Ike bearing down on us. Twenty-four hours ago, I was busy with everything else and hadn’t…
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A curious phone scam
My phone at work rings. The caller ID has a weird number (“50622961841” – yes, it’s got an extra digit in it). I answer. It’s a recording telling me I…
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It can be rational to sell your private information cheaply, even if you value privacy
One of the standard claims about privacy is that people say they value their privacy but behave as if they don’t value it. The standard example involves people trading away…
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Come Join Us Next Spring
It’s been an exciting summer here at the Center for Information Technology Policy. On Friday, we’ll be moving into a brand new building. We’ll be roughly doubling our level of…
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Cheap CAPTCHA Solving Changes the Security Game
ZDNet’s “Zero Day” blog has an interesting post on the gray-market economy in solving CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are those online tests that ask you to type in a sequence of characters…
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Lenz Ruling Raises Epistemological Questions
Stephanie Lenz’s case will be familiar to many of you: After publishing a 29-second video on YouTube that shows her toddler dancing to the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy,” Ms.…
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Gymnastics Scores and Grade Inflation
The gymnastics scoring in this year’s Olympics has generated some controversy, as usual. Some of the controversy feel manufactured: NBC tried to create a hubbub over Nastia Liukin losing the…
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How do you compare security across voting systems?
It’s a curious problem: how do you compare two completely unrelated voting systems and say that one is more or less secure than the other? How can you meaningfully compare…
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Is the New York Times a Confused Company?
Over lunch I did something old-fashioned—I picked up and read a print copy of the New York Times. I was startled to find, on the front of the business section,…