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 job of an academic is to conduct research, and that means publishing manuscripts for the world to read. Computer science is somewhat unusual, among the other disciplines in science…
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NJ Voting Machines Left Unattended, Despite Court Opinion
It’s Election Day in New Jersey. Longtime readers know that in advance of elections I visit polling places in Princeton, looking for voting machines left unattended, where they are vulnerable…
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Regulating and Not Regulating the Internet
There is increasingly heated rhetoric in DC over whether or not the government should begin to “regulate the internet.” Such language is neither accurate nor new. This language implies that…
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Privacy Theater
I have a piece in today’s NY Times “Room for Debate” feature, on whether the government should regulate Facebook. In writing the piece, I was looking for a pithy way…
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School's Laptop Spying Software Exploitable from Anywhere
This post is by Jay Novak, Jon Stribley, and J. Alex Halderman. Absolute Manage is a remote administration program that allows sysadmins to supervise and maintain client computers over the…
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Developing Texts Like We Develop Software
Recently I was asked to speak at a conference for university librarians, about how the future of academic publication looks to me as a computer scientist. It’s an interesting question.…
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India's Electronic Voting Machines Have Security Problems
A team led by Hari Prasad, Alex Halderman, and Rop Gonggrijp released today a technical paper detailing serious security problems with the electronic voting machines (EVMs) used in India. The…
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The Gizmodo Warrant: Searching Journalists in the Terabyte Age
Last Friday night, police officers in California used a warrant to search the home of Jason Chen, the Gizmodo blogger who wrote about the iPhone prototype found in a Redwood…
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Needle-in-a-Haystack Problems, and P vs. NP
Last week I wrote about needle-in-a-haystack problems, in which it’s hard to find the solution but if somebody tells you the solution it’s easy to verify. A commenter asked whether…
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Needle-in-a-Haystack Problems
Sometimes the same idea comes flying at you from several directions at once, and you start seeing that idea everywhere. This has been happening to me lately with needle-in-a-haystack problems,…