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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Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick did a great post a few weeks back on a theme I’ve written about before: peoples’ tendency to underestimate the robustness of open platforms. Once…
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Satyam and the Inadvertent Web
Satyam is one of the handful of large companies who dominate the IT outsourcing market in India, A week ago today, B. Ramalinga Raju, the company chairman, confessed to a…
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Debugging the Zune Blackout
On December 31, some models of the Zune, Microsoft’s portable music player, went dark. The devices were unusable until the following day. Failures like this are sometimes caused by complex…
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Predictions for 2009
Here are our predictions for 2009. These are based on input from Andrew Appel, Joe Calandrino, Will Clarkson, Ari Feldman, Ed Felten, Alex Halderman, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Tim Lee, Paul…
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2008 Predictions Scorecard
As usual, we’ll kick off the new year by reviewing the predictions we made for the previous year. Here now, our 2008 predictions, in italics, with hindsight in ordinary type.…
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More Privacy, Bit by Bit
Before the Holidays, Yahoo got a flurry of good press for the announcement that it would (as the LA Times puts it) “purge user data after 90 days.” My eagle-eyed…
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Taking Advantage of Citizen Contrarians
In my last post, I argued that sifting through citizens’ questions for the President is a job best done outside of government. More broadly, there’s a class of input that…
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Government Shouldn't "Help" Citizens Pick Tough Questions for Obama
A couple of weeks ago, Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica, Ben Smith at Politico and others noted a disturbing pattern on the incoming Obama administration’s Change.gov website: polite but pointed…
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Researchers Show How to Forge Site Certificates
Today at the Chaos Computing Congress, a group of researchers (Alex Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jake Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, Benne de Weger, and David Molnar) announced that they have found a…
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Internet voting-a-go-go
Yes, we know that there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system, but the Estonians are doing their best to get as far away from perfection as possible. According…