The copyright industries’ mantra that “digital is different” has driven an aggressive, global expansion in criminal sanctions for copyright infringement over the last two decades. Historically speaking, criminal penalties for copyright infringement under U.S. law date from the turn of the 20th century, which means that for over a hundred years (from 1790 to 1897), […]
Archives for 2014
Why were CERT researchers attacking Tor?
July 31, 2014 by
Yesterday the Tor Project issued an advisory describing a large-scale identification attack on Tor hidden services. The attack started on January 30 and ended when Tor ejected the attackers on July 4. It appears that this attack was the subject of a Black Hat talk that was canceled abruptly. These attacks raise serious questions about […]
Are We Rushing to Judgment Against the Hidden Power of Algorithms?
July 30, 2014 by
Several recent news stories have highlighted the ways that online social platforms can subtly shape our lives. First came the news that Facebook has “manipulated” users’ emotions by tweaking the balance of happy and sad posts that it shows to some users. Then, this week, the popular online dating service OKCupid announced that it had […]
A Scanner Darkly: Protecting User Privacy from Perceptual Applications
July 16, 2014 by
“A Scanner Darkly”, a dystopian 1977 Philip K. Dick novel (adapted to a 2006 film), describes a society with pervasive audio and video surveillance. Our paper “A Scanner Darkly”, which appeared in last year’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) and has just received the 2014 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, takes a closer look at […]
