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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Dan Wallach recently wrote about his smart electric meter, which keeps track of the second-by-second current draw of his whole house. But what he might like to know is, exactly…
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Burn Notice, season 4, and the abuse of the MacGuffin
One of my favorite TV shows is Burn Notice. It’s something of a spy show, with a certain amount of gadgets but generally no James Bond-esque Q to supply equipment…
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The Flawed Legal Architecture of the Certificate Authority Trust Model
Researchers have recently criticized the Certificate Authority Trust Model — which involves the issuance and use of digital certificates to authenticate the identity of websites to end-users — because of…
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Ninth Circuit Ruling in MDY v. Blizzard
The Ninth Circuit has ruled on the MDY v. Blizzard case, which involves contract, copyright, and DMCA claims. As with the district court ruling, I’ll withhold comment due to my…
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Court Rules Email Protected by Fourth Amendment
Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the contents of the messages in an email inbox hosted on a provider’s servers are protected by…
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Two Stories about the Comcast/Level 3 Dispute (Part 2)
In my last post I told a story about the Level 3/Comcast dispute that portrays Comcast in a favorable light. Now here’s another story that casts Comcast as the villain.…
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Two Stories about the Comcast/Level 3 Dispute (Part 1)
Like Steve and a lot of other people in the tech policy world, I’ve been trying to understand the dispute between Level 3 and Comcast. The combination of technical complexity…
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Smart electrical meters and their smart peripherals
When I was a college undergraduate, I lived in a 1920’s duplex and I recall my roommate and I trying to figure out where our electrical bill was going. He…
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Unpeeling the mystique of tamper-indicating seals
As computer scientists have studied the trustworthiness of different voting technologies over the past decade, we notice that “security seals” are often used by election officials. It’s natural to wonder…
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Trying to Make Sense of the Comcast / Level 3 Dispute
[Update: I gave a brief interview to Marketplace Tech Report] The last 48 hours has given rise to a fascinating dispute between Level 3 (a major internet backbone provider) and…