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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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…
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Does cloud mining make sense?
[Paul Ellenbogen is a second year Ph.D. student at Princeton who’s been looking into the economics and game theory of Bitcoin, among other topics. He’s a coauthor of our recent…
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The Chilling Effects of Confidentiality Creep
Today, North Carolina’s Governor Pat McCrory has a bill on his desk that would make it impossible for the public to find out what entities are supplying the chemical cocktail…
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Analyzing the 2013 Bitcoin fork: centralized decision-making saved the day
On March 11, 2013, Bitcoin experienced a technical crisis. Versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the software diverged from each other in behavior due to a bug, causing the block chain…