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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Greetings Freedom to Tinker readers! I’m Alex Halderman, one of Ed Felten’s grad students at Princeton. I’d like to thank Ed for the opportunity to be a regular contributor to…
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Sony Plans to Emulate Apple, in a Non-Apple-Like Way
Sony says it wants to create a system that does for movies what Apple’s iTunes does for music, according to a CNET story by Stefanie Olsen. Unfortunately Sony doesn’t seem…
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Welcome to Alex Halderman
I’m pleased to announce that Alex Halderman, a second-year graduate student who works with me, now has a byline here on Freedom to Tinker. Alex works on computer security and…
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A (True) Story for Grokster Eve
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…