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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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…
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A technological approach to better living, for D.C. and beyond
Washington, D.C., could be a leader in the United States — and worldwide — in using technology to improve the lives of its residents and visitors. As a rapidly growing…
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Bitcoin mining is NP-hard
This post is (mostly) a theoretical curiosity, but a discussion last week at CITP during our new course on Bitcoin led us to realize that being an optimal Bitcoin miner is…
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Four Fair Use Takeaways from Cambridge University Press v. Patton
The most important copyright and educational fair use case in recent memory (mine, at least) was decided by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals last week. The case, Cambridge University…
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POODLE and the fundamental market failure of browser security
Last week saw the public disclosure of the POODLE vulnerability, a practical attack allowing a network attacker to steal plaintext from HTTPS connections. In particular, this attack can be used to steal…
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On the value of encrypting your phone
This is a true story. Yesterday my phone crashed, and it wouldn’t reboot. Actually it would do nothing but reboot, over and over, with a seemingly different error message every…
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Guessing passwords with Apple’s full-device encryption
With the recently-introduced iOS 8, Apple has switched to a encrypting a much larger amount of user data by default. Matt Green has provided an excellent initial look at a…
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It’s time to bring Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies into the computer science curriculum
In the privacy technologies grad seminar that I taught last semester, Bitcoin proved to be the most popular topic among students. Two groups did very different and equally interesting final…
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Google Fights Genericide Claim (and Wins)
Google’s famous trademark in its name has just survived a challenger’s attempt to have it declared generic. In Elliott v. Google, a federal court in Arizona held last week that…