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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Jim Griffin, a music industry consultant who is in the unusual position of being recognized as smart and reasonable by participants across a broad swath of positions in the copyright…
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An Inconvenient Truth About Privacy
One of the lessons we’ve learned from Al Gore is that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. We all like to tool around in our SUVs,…
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Comcast and BitTorrent: Why You Can't Negotiate with a Protocol
The big tech policy news yesterday was Comcast’s announcement that it will stop impeding BitTorrent traffic, but instead will respond to network congestion by slowing traffic from the highest-volume users,…
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California review of the ES&S AutoMARK and M100
California’s Secretary of State has been busy. It appears that ES&S (manufacturers of the Ink-a-Vote voting system, used in Los Angeles, as well as the iVotronic systems that made news…
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The Security Mindset and "Harmless Failures"
Bruce Schneier has an interesting new essay about how security people see the world. Here’s a sample: Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some…
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Sequoia's Explanation, and Why It's Not the Whole Story
I wrote yesterday about discrepancies in the results reported by Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines in New Jersey. Sequoia issued a memo giving their explanation for what might have happened.…
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Evidence of New Jersey Election Discrepancies
Press reports on the recent New Jersey voting discrepancies have been a bit vague about the exact nature of the evidence that showed up on election day. What has the…
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Interesting Email from Sequoia
A copy of an email I received has been passed around on various mailing lists. Several people, including reporters, have asked me to confirm its authenticity. Since everyone seems to…
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Privacy: Beating the Commitment Problem
I wrote yesterday about a market failure relating to privacy, in which a startup company can’t convincingly commit to honoring its customers’ privacy later, after the company is successful. If…
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Privacy and the Commitment Problem
One of the challenges in understanding privacy is how to square what people say about privacy with what they actually do. People say they care deeply about privacy and resent…