Tag: Privacy
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The Slingbox Pro: Information Leakage and Variable Bitrate (VBR) Fingerprints
[Today’s guest blogger is Yoshi Kohno, a Computer Science prof at University of Washington who has done interesting work on security and privacy topics including e-voting. – Ed] If you follow technology news, you might be aware of the buzz surrounding technologies that mate the Internet with your TV. The Slingbox Pro and the Apple…
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Why So Many False Positives on the No-Fly List?
Yesterday I argued that Walter Murphy’s much-discussed encounter with airport security was probably just a false positive in the no-fly list matching algorithm. Today I want to talk about why false positives (ordinary citizens triggering mistaken “matches” with the list) are so common. First, a preliminary. It’s often argued that the high false positive rate…
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Walter Murphy Stopped at Airport: Another False Positive
Blogs are buzzing about the story of Walter Murphy, a retired Princeton professor who reported having triggered a no-fly list match on a recent trip. Prof. Murphy suspects this happened because he has given speeches criticizing the Bush Administration. I studied the no-fly list mechanism (and the related watchlist) during my service on the TSA’s…
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Viacom, YouTube, and Privacy
Yesterday’s top tech policy story was the copyright lawsuits filed by Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, MTV, and Paramount Pictures, against YouTube and its owner Google. Viacom’s complaint accuses YouTube of direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement, and inducing infringement. The complaint tries to paint YouTube as a descendant of Napster and Grokster.…
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Soft Coercion and the Secret Ballot
Today I want to continue our discussion of the secret ballot. (Previous posts: 1, 2.) One purpose of the secret ballot is to prevent coercion: if ballots are strongly secret, then the voter cannot produce evidence of how he voted, allowing him to lie safely to the would-be coercer about how he voted. Talk about…
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Voting, Secrecy, and Phonecams
Yesterday I wrote about the recent erosion of the secret ballot. One cause is the change in voting technology, especially voting by mail. But even if we don’t change our voting technology at all, changes in other technologies are still eroding the secret ballot. Phonecams are a good example. You probably carry into the voting…
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New Congress, Same Old Issues
With control of the House and Senate about to switch parties, everybody is wondering how the new management will affect their pet policy issues. Cameron Wilson has a nice forecast for tech policy issues such as competitiveness, globalization, privacy, DRM, and e-voting. Most of these don’t break down as partisan issues – differences are larger…
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HP Spokesman Says Company Regrets Spying on Him
As most people know by now, Hewlett-Packard was recently caught spying on its directors and employees, and some reporters, using methods that are probably illegal and certainly unethical. Throughout the scandal, we’ve heard a lot from HP spokesman Mike Moeller. This got my attention because Mike was my next-door neighbor in Palo Alto during my…
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Silver Bullet Podcast
Today we’re getting hep with the youngsters, and offering a podcast in place of the regular blog entry. Technically speaking, it’s somebody else’s podcast – Gary McGraw’s Silver Bullet – but it is a twenty-minute interview with me, much of it discussing blog-related issues. Excerpts will appear in an upcoming issue of IEEE Security &…
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Great, Now They'll Never Give Us Data
Today’s New York Times has an interesting article by Katie Hafner on AOL’s now-infamous release of customers’ search data. AOL’s goal in releasing the data was to help researchers by giving them realistic data to study. Today’s technologies, such as search engines, have generated huge volumes of information about what people want online and why.…