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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Yesterday’s top tech policy story was the copyright lawsuits filed by Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, MTV, and Paramount Pictures, against YouTube and its owner Google. Viacom’s complaint…
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Protect E-Voting — Support H.R. 811
After a long fight, we have reached the point where a major e-voting reform bill has a chance to become U.S. law. I’m referring to HR 811, sponsored by my…
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How I Became a Policy Wonk
It’s All-Request Friday, when I blog on topics suggested by readers. David Molnar writes, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how your work has come to have significant…
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How Computers Can Make Voting More Secure
By now there is overwhelming evidence that today’s paperless computer-based voting technologies have such serious security and reliability problems that we should not be using them. Computers can’t do the…
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Fact check: The New Yorker versus Wikipedia
In July—when The New Yorker ran a long and relatively positive piece about Wikipedia—I argued that the old-media method of laboriously checking each fact was superior to the wiki model,…
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Introducing All-Request Friday
Adapting an idea from Tyler Cowen, I’m going to try a new feature, where on Fridays I post about topics suggested by readers. Please post your suggested topics in the…
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Manipulating Reputation Systems
BoingBoing points to a nice pair of articles by Annalee Newitz on how people manipulate online reputation systems like eBay’s user ratings, Digg, and so on. There’s a myth floating…
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Sarasota: Could a Bug Have Lost Votes?
At this point, we still don’t know what caused the high undervote rate in Sarasota’s Congressional election. [Background: 1, 2.] There are two theories. The State-commissioned study released last week…
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Sarasota Voting Machines Insecure
The technical team commissioned by the State of Florida to study the technology used in the ill-fated Sarasota election has released its report. (Background: on the Sarasota election problems; on…
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Why Understanding Programs is Hard
Senator Sam Brownback has reportedly introduced a bill that would require the people rating videogames to play the games in their entirety before giving a rating. This reflects a misconception…