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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My book manuscript, Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age, is now in Open Review. That means that while the book manuscript goes through traditional peer review, I…
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The Effect of DNS on Tor’s Anonymity
This blog post is joint work with Benjamin Greschbach, Tobias Pulls, Laura M. Roberts, and Nick Feamster. Counting almost two million daily users and 7,000 relays, the Tor network is…
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My testimony before the House Subcommittee on IT
I was invited to testify yesterday before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Information Technology, at a hearing entitled “Cybersecurity: Ensuring the Integrity of the Ballot Box.” My written…
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Are you really anonymous online?
As you browse the internet, online advertisers track nearly every site you visit, amassing a trove of information on your habits and preferences. When you visit a news site, they…
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Which voting machines can be hacked through the Internet?
Over 9000 jurisdictions (counties and states) in the U.S. run elections with a variety of voting machines: optical scanners for paper ballots, and direct-recording “touchscreen” machines. Which ones of them…
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Bitcoin’s history deserves to be better preserved
Much of Bitcoin’s development has happened in the open in a transparent manner through the mailing list and the bitcoin-dev IRC channel. The third-party website BitcoinStats maintains logs of the…
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All the News That’s Fit to Change: Insights into a corpus of 2.5 million news headlines
[Thanks to Joel Reidenberg for encouraging this deeper dive into news headlines!] There is no guarantee that a news headline you see online today will not change tomorrow, or even…
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Improving Bitcoin’s Privacy and Scalability with TumbleBit
Last week we unveiled TumbleBit, a new anonymous payments scheme that addresses two major technical challenges faced by Bitcoin today: (1) scaling Bitcoin to meet increasing use, and (2) protecting…
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Routing Detours: Can We Avoid Nation-State Surveillance?
Since 2013, Brazil has taken significant steps to build out their networking infrastructure to thwart nation-state mass surveillance. For example, the country is deploying a 3,500-mile fiber cable from Fortaleza,…
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Differential Privacy is Vulnerable to Correlated Data — Introducing Dependent Differential Privacy
[This post is joint work with Princeton graduate student Changchang Liu and IBM researcher Supriyo Chakraborty. See our paper for full details. — Prateek Mittal ] The tussle between data…