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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I’m thinking about turning on the Comments feature, so that readers can react to my postings right here on the site. So far I haven’t allowed comments, because I prefer…
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Trade Secrets and Free Speech
Yesterday the California Supreme Court issued its ruling in DVDCCA v. Bunner, a case pitting trade secrets against freedom of speech. The court ruled that an injunction against disclosure of…
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It's Ten O'Clock. Do You Know What Your Computer is Doing?
Last week saw a scary story about a British man who was acquitted of the charge of possessing child pr0n. [Deliberate misspelling to keep dumb censorware tools from blocking this…
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Bizarro Compliments
To a technologist, law and policy debates sometimes seem to be held in a kind of bizarro world, where words and concepts lose their ordinary meanings. Some technologists never get…
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Guided Voting
Eugene Volokh offers an interesting post on “guided voting,” a simple idea with important implications. Voters often rely on the recommendations of others, such as political parties, interest groups, or…
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Email Redesign Not Helpful
Some have argued that we can address the spam problem by redesigning SMTP, the basic email-handling protocol used on the Net. Eric Rescorla rebuts that argument with a clear and…
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Revisionism
Seth Finkelstein points to a rather sloppy analysis by Peter Davies of the Felten v. Recording Industry lawsuit. There is enough of this sort of thing going around that I…
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Bring on the Subpoena-Bots!
A few years ago I was summoned for jury duty. The summons was an old-fashioned computer-printed document spit out by an IBM mainframe computer down at the county courthouse. Procedural…
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Voting Machine Insecurity
Recently, researchers at John Hopkins and Rice Universities reported serious security flaws in electronic voting technology sold by Diebold. I haven’t yet had a chance to read the paper carefully,…
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Conflict of Interest
Several readers have asked about the big project that has kept me from blogging much this summer. The “project” involved expert witness testimony in a lawsuit, Eolas Technologies and University…