I just came across an amazing-looking multi-disciplinary symposium on privacy and surveillance at Berekely: Unblinking: New Perspectives on Visual Privacy in the 21st Century. The program is quite impressive, including Ian Kerr (who gave the keynote last week at our…
Category: Issues
Security Analysis (and Response) of Diebold Voting Machines
Ari Feldman, Alex Halderman, and Ed Felton released an amazing paper on the security of Dielbold's e-voting technology. The paper is accompanied by a ten-minute video that demonstrates some of the vulnerabilities they've uncovered. Here is the paper’s abstract: Security…
Read More Security Analysis (and Response) of Diebold Voting Machines
Sanger to Fork Wikipedia into Citizendium
Larry Sanger, first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, announced yesterday his plans to fork the project into a competitor to Wikipedia called The Citizendium. Sanger describes it as "an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance." The…
Grokster Site Warning Visitors, Collecting IPs
Eric Goldman recently visited Grokster's website at http://www.grokster.com and got the following stern warning: The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorized…
LonelyGirl15 ID’d through Amateur Data-Mining
It was recently revealed (confirmed?) that the popular online video diaries of LonelyGirl15 were not authentic, but a publicity stunt of entertainment folks linked to Hollywood talent agency CAA. Today, the real identity of LonelyGirl15 has also been revealed, mostly…
Google Celebrates Your Freedom to Read, Unless, of Course, You’re in China
Leslie Burger, the president of the American Library Association is helping Google celebrate Banned Books Week, taking place this year Sept. 23-30. Her post at Google's blog encourages us to visit google.com/bannedbooks, where we can use Google Book Search to…
Read More Google Celebrates Your Freedom to Read, Unless, of Course, You’re in China
Wikipedia Defies China’s Censors; Challenges Google
Wikipedia has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive entries. Jimmy Wales also challenged other Internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with…
Read More Wikipedia Defies China’s Censors; Challenges Google
Facebook Offers Privacy Fix, But Only If You Select It
It appears Facebook has indeed modified their controversial news feed feature to allow more user control over their own privacy. But as Mary Hodder points out, the default settings allow full sharing of informaiton: So, users still must take direct…
Read More Facebook Offers Privacy Fix, But Only If You Select It
Peer-to-peer surveillance
I've commented about some of the privacy & surveillance implications of adding location meta tags in photos, everyone snapping photos in public with their cellphone cameras, and the rise of amateur surveillance and data-mining. Many of these concerns are repeated…
More on Facebook and the Contextual Integrity of Personal Information Flows
There has been an interesting discussion on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list (and across the blogosphere) regarding the addition of feeds at Facebook and the nature of the reaction by its users. Many have criticized the reaction by…
Read More More on Facebook and the Contextual Integrity of Personal Information Flows
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