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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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…
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AACS: Slow Start on Traitor Tracing
[Previous posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.] Alex wrote on Thursday about the next step in the breakdown of AACS, the encryption scheme used…
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AACS: A Tale of Three Keys
[Previous posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.] This week brings further developments in the gradual meltdown of AACS (the encryption scheme used for HD-DVD and…
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Is there any such thing as “enough” technological progress?
Yesterday, Ed considered the idea that there may be “a point of diminishing returns where more capacity doesn’t improve the user’s happiness.†It’s a provocative concept, and one that I…
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How Much Bandwidth is Enough?
It is a matter of faith among infotech experts that (1) the supply of computing and communications will increase rapidly according to Moore’s Law, and (2) the demand for that…