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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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…
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Cyberterrorism or Cybervandalism?
When hackers believed by the U.S. government to have been sponsored by the state of North Korea infiltrated Sony Pictures’ corporate network and leaked reams of sensitive documents, the act…
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Consensus in Bitcoin: One system, many models
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…