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.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
Here We Go Again
Rep. John Conyers has introduced the Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security (ACCOPS) Act of 2003 in the House of Representatives. The oddest provision of the bill is…
-
Back in the Saddle
I haven’t been posting much lately, due to a high-intensity project that has sucked up all of my time. But now that’s over, so I should return to normal posting…