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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Like many others who read this blog, I’ve spent some time over the last year trying to get more civic data online. I’ve argued that government’s failure to put machine-readable…
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Twittering for the Marines
The Marines recently issued an order banning social network sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.). The Pentagon is reviewing this sort of thing across all services. This follows on the heels…
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AP's DRM Announcement: Much Ado About Nothing
Last week the Associated Press announced it would be developing some kind of online news registry to control use of news content. From AP’s press release: The registry will employ…
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What Economic Forces Drive Cloud Computing?
You know a technology trend is all-pervasive when you see New York Times op-eds about it — and this week saw the first Times op-ed about cloud computing, by Jonathan…
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Lessons from Amazon's 1984 Moment
Amazon got some well-deserved criticism for yanking copies of Orwell’s 1984 from customers’ Kindles last week. Let me spare you the copycat criticism of Amazon — and the obvious 1984-themed…
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A Freedom-of-Speech-based Approach To Limiting Filesharing – Part III: Smoke, smoke!
Over the past two days we have seen that filesharing is vulnerable to spamming, and that as a defense, the filesharers have used the IP block list to exclude the…
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A Freedom-of-Speech-based Approach To Limiting Filesharing – Part II: The Block List
On Wednesday we discussed the open structure of filesharing and its resulting vulnerability to spam. While there are some similarities between e-mail and gnutella spam, the spoof files have no…
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A Freedom-of-Speech Approach To Limiting Filesharing – Part I: Filesharing and Spam
[Today we kick off a series of three guest posts by Mitch Golden. Mitch was a professor of physics when, in 1995, he was bitten by the Internet bug and…
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If You're Going to Track Me, Please Use Cookies
Web cookies have a bad name. People often complain — with good reason — about sites using cookies to track them. Today I want to say a few words in…
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Thoughtcrime Experiments
Cosmic rays can flip bits in memory cells or processor datapaths. Once upon a time, Sudhakar and I asked the question, “can an attacker exploit rare and random bit-flips to…