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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Recently I met a promising young computer scientist, whose name I will withhold for reasons that will soon be evident. He has developed a very interesting network software system that…
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Coming: Mobile Phone Viruses
Clive Thompson at Slate has a scary-sounding new piece about cellphone viruses. As phones get smart – as they start running general-purpose operating systems and having complex software interfaces –…
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Apple Closes iTunes Store "Security Hole"
Last week, DVD-Jon and two colleagues released PyMusique, a tool for buying songs from Apple’s iTunes Music Store (iTMS) site. This got some people upset, because songs bought with PyMusique…
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Cornell Researchers on P2P Quality Control
Kevin Walsh and Emin Gün Sirer, of Cornell University, have a new paper on Credence, a system for detecting unwanted files in P2P networks. It’s a kind of reputation system…
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Godwin's Law, Updated
One of the most famous observations about online discussions is Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. When…
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Pharm Policy
I wrote Monday about pharming attacks, in which a villain corrupts the DNS system, which translates textual names (like “www.freedom-to-tinker.com”) into the IP addresses (like “216.157.129.231”) that are used to…
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Unwanted Calls and Spam on VoIP
Fred Cohen is predicting that VoIP will bring with it a flood of unsolicited commercial phone calls. (VoIP, or “Voice over Internet Protocol,” systems deliver telephone-like service, making connections via…
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Pharming
Internet spoofing attacks have been getting more and more sophisticated. The latest evil trick is “Pharming,” which relies on DNS poisoning (explanation below) to trick users about which site they…
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Harvard Business School Boots 119 Applicants for "Hacking" Into Admissions Site
Harvard Business School (HBS) has rejected 119 applicants who allegedly “hacked” in to a third-party site to learn whether HBS had admitted them. An AP story, by Jay Lindsay, has…
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Cal-Induce Bill Morphs Into Filtering Mandate
A bill in the California state senate (SB 96), previously dubbed the “Cal-Induce Act,” has now morphed via amendment into a requirement that copyright and porn filters be included in…