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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Recently Apple announced that, for the first time ever, ad-blocking plugins will be allowed in mobile Safari in iOS 9. There has been a large outpouring of commentary about this,…
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VW = Voting Wulnerability
On Friday, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “accused the German automaker of using software to detect when the car is undergoing its periodic state emissions testing. Only during such…
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Freedom to Tinker on the Radio
Today on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s CBC Radio show, “The Current”, a 20-minute segment about the freedom to tinker: “Arrested, for tinkering. Young Ahmed Mohamed likes to take things apart,…
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“Private blockchain” is just a confusing name for a shared database
Banks and financial institutions seem to be all over the blockchain. It seems they agree with the Bitcoin community that the technology behind Bitcoin can provide an efficient platform for settlement and…
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Ancestry.com can use your DNA to target ads
With the reduction in costs of genotyping technology, genetic genealogy has become accessible to more people. Various websites such as Ancestry.com offer genetic genealogy services. Users of these services are…
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Bitcoin course available on Coursera; textbook is now official
Earlier this year we made our online course on Bitcoin publicly available — 11 video lectures and draft chapters of our textbook-in-progress, including exercises. The response has been very positive: numerous…
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Voting Every Day: Smartphones, Civil Rights and Civic Participation
The process of influencing government action has undergone a significant transformation in the age of the smartphone. Of course, the traditional lobbying business continues to thrive, with companies, trade associations…
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Robots don't threaten, but may be useful threats
Hi, I’m Joanna Bryson, and I’m just starting as a fellow at CITP, on sabbatical from the University of Bath. I’ve been blogging about natural and artificial intelligence since 2007,…
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How not to measure security
A recent paper published by Smartmatic, a vendor of voting systems, caught my attention. The first thing is that it’s published by Springer, which typically publishes peer-reviewed articles – which…
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The Defend Trade Secrets Act Has Returned
Freedom to Tinker readers may recall that I’ve previously warned about legislation to create a federal private cause of action for trade secret misappropriation in the name of fighting cyber-espionage against United States…