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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[This is the third post in a series on best practices for government datasets by Harlan Yu and me. (previous posts)] When the government releases a dataset, citizens ideally will…
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Basic Data Format Lessons
[This is the second post in a series on best practices for government datasets by Harlan Yu and me. (previous post)] When creating a dataset, the preferences of developers may…
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Government Datasets That Facilitate Innovation
[This is the first post in a series on best practices for government datasets by Harlan Yu and me.] There’s a growing consensus that the government can increase its openness…
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Web Certification Fail: Bad Assumptions Lead to Bad Technology
It should be abundantly clear, from two recent posts here, that the current model for certifying the identity of web sites is deeply flawed. When you connect to a web…
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Web Security Trust Models
[This is part of a series of posts on this topic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.] Last week, Ed described the current debate over whether Mozilla should…
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Google Buzzkill
The launch of Google Buzz, the new social networking service tied to GMail, was a fiasco to say the least. Its default settings exposed people’s e-mail contacts in frightening ways…
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Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese CA
[Note our follow-up posts on this topic: Web Security Trust Models, and Web Certification Fail: Bad Assumptions Lead to Bad Technology] Sometimes geeky technical details matter only to engineers. But…
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The Engine of Job Growth? Tracking SBA-backed Loans Through Recovery.gov
Last week at a Town Hall Meeting in New Hampshire, President Obama stated that “we’re going to start where most new jobs start—with small businesses,” and he encouraged Congress to…
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The Traceability of an Anonymous Online Comment
Yesterday, I described a simple scenario where a plaintiff, who is having difficulty identifying an alleged online defamer, could benefit from subpoenaing data held by a third party web service…
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What Third Parties Know About John Doe
As David mentioned in his previous post, plaintiffs’ lawyers in online defamation suits will typically issue a sequence of two “John Doe” subpoenas to try to unmask the identity of…