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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P2P United, a group of P2P software vendors, sent a letter to Congress last week claiming that P2P vendors are unable to redesign their software to block the transmission of…
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Googlocracy in Action
The conventional wisdom these days is that Google is becoming less useful, because people are manipulating its rankings. The storyline goes like this: Once upon a time, back in the…
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Safire: US Blew Up Soviet Pipeline with Software Trojan Horse
William Safire tells an amazing story in his column in today’s New York Times. He says that in the early 1980’s, the U.S. government hid malicious code in oil-pipeline-control software…
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Tennessee Super-DMCA: It's Baaaaaaack!
The Tennessee Super-DMCA is back. Here’s the text of the latest version. Like the previous version, which died in a past legislative session, this bill looks like an attempt to…
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Can Ownership Be Owned?
Julian Dibbell, at TerraNova, points out an issued U.S. Patent that seems to cover digital property systems of the type used by many multiplayer online games: How naive must one…
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Balancing Can Be Harder Than It Looks
Reflecting on the recent argument about Howard Dean’s old smartcard speech, Larry Lessig condemns the kind of binary thinking that would divide us all into two camps, pro-privacy vs. pro-national-security.…
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Diebold Fails Yet Another Security Evaluation
A group of ex-NSA security experts, hired by the state of Maryland to evaluate the state’s Diebold electronic voting systems, found the systems riddled with basic security flaws. This confirmed…
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Dean's Smart-Card Speech
Declan McCullagh at CNet news.com criticizes a speech given by Howard Dean about two years ago, in which Dean called for aggressive adoption of smartcard-based state driver’s licenses and smartcard…
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Was the Senate File Pilfering Criminal?
Some people have argued that the Senate file pilfering could not have violated the law, because the files were reportedly on a shared network drive that was not password-protected. (See,…
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Senate File Pilfering "Extensive"
Charlie Savage reports in today’s Boston Globe: Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing…