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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At a technical level, the Bitcoin protocol is a clever solution to the consensus problem in computer science. The idea of consensus is very general — a number of participants…
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On the Sony Pictures Security Breach
The recent security breach at Sony Pictures is one of the most embarrassing breaches ever, though not the most technically sophisticated. The incident raises lots of interesting questions about the…
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Why ASICs may be good for Bitcoin
Bitcoin mining is now almost exclusively performed by Bitcoin-specific ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). These chips are made by a few startup manufacturers and cannot be used for anything else besides…
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Striking a balance between advertising and ad blocking
In the news, we have a consortium of French publishers, which somehow includes several major U.S. corporations (Google, Microsoft), attempting to sue AdBlock Plus developer Eyeo, a German firm with developers…
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Expert Panel Report: A New Governance Model for Communications Security?
Today, the vulnerable state of electronic communications security dominates headlines across the globe, while surveillance, money and power increasingly permeate the ‘cybersecurity’ policy arena. With the stakes so high, how…
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"Information Sharing" Should Include the Public
The FBI recently issued a warning to U.S. businesses about the possibility of foreign-based malware attacks. According to a Reuters story by Jim Finkle: The five-page, confidential “flash” FBI warning…
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How do we decide how much to reveal? (Hint: Our privacy behavior might be socially constructed.)
[Let’s welcome Aylin Caliskan-Islam, a graduate student at Drexel. In this post she discusses new work that applies machine learning and natural-language processing to questions of privacy and social behavior. — Arvind…
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Let’s Encrypt: Bringing HTTPS to Every Web Site
HTTPS, the cryptographic protocol used to secure web traffic as it travels across the Internet, has been in the news a lot recently. We’ve heard about security problems like Goto…
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PCLOB testimony on "Defining Privacy"
This morning I’m testifying at a hearing of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, on the topic of “Defining Privacy”. Here is the text of my oral testimony. (This…