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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When Microsoft shipped its Xbox game console, Linux programmers salivated. The Xbox was a pretty nice computer, priced at $149. The Xbox had all the hardware needed to run Linux…
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How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Ah, summer, when a man’s thoughts turn to … ski jumping? On Sunday I had the chance to try ski jumping, at the Swiss national team’s training center at Einsiedeln.…
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Syndromic Surveillance: 21st Century Data Harvesting
[This article was written by a pseudonymous reader who calls him/herself Enigma Foundry. I’m publishing it here because I think other readers would find it interesting. – Ed Felten] The…
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The Last Mile Bottleneck and Net Neutrality
When thinking about the performance of any computer system or network, the first question to ask is “Where is the bottleneck?” As demand grows, one part of the system reaches…
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The Exxon Valdez of Privacy
Recently I moderated a panel discussion, at Princeton Reunions, about “Privacy and Security in the Digital Age”. When the discussion turned to public awareness of privacy and data leaks, one…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: False Positives
Lately I’ve been writing about the policy issues surrounding government wiretapping programs that algorithmically analyze large amounts of communication data to identify messages to be shown to human analysts. (Past…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Reconciling with the Law
When the NSA’s wiretapping program first came to light, the White House said, mysteriously, that they didn’t get warrants for all of their wiretaps because doing so would have been…
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Adobe Scares Microsoft with Antitrust Threat?
Microsoft has changed the next versions of Windows and Office after antitrust lawsuit threats from Adobe, according to Ina Fried’s article at news.com. Here’s a summary of Microsoft’s changes: [Microsoft]…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Content-Based Suspicion
Yesterday I argued that allowing police to record all communications that are flagged by some automated algorithm might be reasonable, if the algorithm is being used to recognize the voice…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Recognition
For the past several weeks I’ve been writing, on and off, about how technology enables new types of wiretapping, and how public policy should cope with those changes. Having laid…