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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Today researchers disclosed a new security flaw in TLS/SSL, the protocol used to secure web connections. The flaw is significant in itself, but it is also a good example of…
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A clear line between offense and defense
The New York Times, in an editorial today entitled “Arms Control for a Cyberage“, writes, The problem is that unlike conventional weapons, with cyberweapons “there’s no clear line between offense…
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We can de-anonymize programmers from coding style. What are the implications?
In a recent post, I talked about our paper showing how to identify anonymous programmers from their coding styles. We used a combination of lexical features (e.g., variable name choices),…
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Lenovo Pays For Careless Product Decisions
The discovery last week that Lenovo laptops had been shipping with preinstalled adware that left users wide open to security exploitation triggered a lot of righteous anger in the tech…
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In Partial Defense of the Seahawks' Play Calling
The conventional wisdom about last night’s Super Bowl is that the Seahawks made a game-losing mistake by running a passing play from the Patriots’ one yard line in the closing…
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Nine awesome Bitcoin projects at Princeton
As promised, here are the final project presentations from the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies class I taught at Princeton. I encouraged students to build something real, rather than toy class projects,…
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Android WebView security and the mobile advertising marketplace
Freedom to Tinker readers are probably aware of the current controversy over Google’s handling of ongoing security vulnerabilities in its Android WebView component. What sounds at first like a routine…
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Sign up now for the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies online course
At Princeton I taught a course on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies during the semester that just ended. Joe Bonneau unofficially co-taught it with me. Based on student feedback and what…
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Anonymous programmers can be identified by analyzing coding style
Every programmer learns to code in a unique way which results in distinguishing “fingerprints” in coding style. These fingerprints can be used to compare the source code of known programmers…
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Shaping Wi-Fi’s future: the wireless-mobile convergence
According to recent news, Comcast is being sued because it is taking advantage of users’ resources to build up its own nationwide Wi-Fi network. Since mid-2013 the company has been…