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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In a new paper to be presented next week at WEIS by Jeremy Clark, we discuss the challenges in designing truly decentralized prediction markets and order books. Prediction markets allow…
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Cognitive disconnect: Understanding Facebook Connect login permissions
[Nicky Robinson is an undergraduate whose Junior Independent Work project, advised by Joseph Bonneau, turned into a neat research paper. — Arvind Narayanan] When you use the Facebook Connect [1]…
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Bitcoin Mining Now Dominated by One Pool
The big news in the Bitcoin world, is that one entity, called GHash, seems to be in control of more than half of all of the mining power. A part…
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Encryption as protest
As a computer scientist who studies Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, I remember my surprise when I first learned that some groups of people view and use them very differently than I’m used…
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Why King George III Can Encrypt
[This is a guest post by Wenley Tong, Sebastian Gold, Samuel Gichohi, Mihai Roman, and Jonathan Frankle, undergraduates in the Privacy Technologies seminar that I offered for the second time in…
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If Robots Replace Lawyers, Will Politics Calm Down?
[TL;DR: Probably not.] A recent essay from law professor John McGinnis, titled “Machines v. Lawyers,” explores how machine learning and other digital technologies may soon reshape the legal profession, and by extension,…
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Wickr: Putting the “non” in anonymity
[Let’s welcome new CITP blogger Pete Zimmerman, a first-year graduate student in the computer security group at Princeton. — Arvind Narayanan] Following the revelations of wide-scale surveillance by US intelligence agencies…
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Increasing Civic Engagement Requires Understanding Why People Have Chosen Not to Participate
Last month, I was a poll watcher for the mayoral primary in Washington, DC. My duties were to monitor several polling places to confirm that each Precinct Captain was ensuring…
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Threshold signatures and Bitcoin wallet security: A menu of options
Before Bitcoin can mature as a currency, the security of wallets must be improved. Previously, I motivated the need for sharing Bitcoin wallets using threshold signatures as a means to…
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Free Law Project Partnering in Stewardship of RECAP
More than five years ago, I spoke at CITP about the US Federal Courts electronic access system called PACER. I noted that despite centuries of precedent stating that the public…