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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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…
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Report Critical of Internet Voting
Four respected computer scientists, members of a government-commissioned study panel, have published a report critical of SERVE, a proposed system to let overseas military people vote in elections via a…
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Bio Analogies in Computer Security
Every so often, somebody gets the idea that computers should detect viruses in the same way that the human immune system detects bio-viruses. Faced with the problem of how to…
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Searching for Currency-Detection Software
Richard M. Smith observes that several products known to detect images of currency refer users to http://www.rulesforuse.org, a site that explains various countries’ laws about use of currency images. It…
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Photoshop and Currency
Several things have been missed in the recent flare-up over Adobe Photoshop’s refusal to import images of currency. (For background, see Ted Bridis’s APstory.) There’s a hidden gem in the…