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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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…
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Identifying John Doe: It might be easier than you think
Imagine that you want to sue someone for what they wrote, anonymously, in a web-based online forum. To succeed, you’ll first have to figure out who they really are. How…
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CITP Seeks Visiting Faculty, Scholars or Policy Experts for 2010-2011
The Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University seeks candidates for positions as visiting faculty members or researchers, or postdoctoral research associates for the 2010-2011 academic year. About…
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iPad to Test Zittrain's "Future of the Internet" Thesis
Jonathan Zittrain famously argued in his book “The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It” that we were headed for a future in which general purpose computers would…