March 19, 2024

Archives for August 2015

Bitcoin course available on Coursera; textbook is now official

Earlier this year we made our online course on Bitcoin publicly available — 11 video lectures and draft chapters of our textbook-in-progress, including exercises. The response has been very positive: numerous students have sent us thanks, comments, feedback, and a few error corrections. We’ve heard that our materials are being used in courses at a few […]

Robots don't threaten, but may be useful threats

Hi, I’m Joanna Bryson, and I’m just starting as a fellow at CITP, on sabbatical from the University of Bath.  I’ve been blogging about natural and artificial intelligence since 2007, increasingly with attention to public policy.  I’ve been writing about AI ethics since 1998.  This is my first blog post for Freedom to Tinker. Will […]

How not to measure security

A recent paper published by Smartmatic, a vendor of voting systems, caught my attention. The first thing is that it’s published by Springer, which typically publishes peer-reviewed articles – which this is not. This is a marketing piece. It’s disturbing that a respected imprint like Springer would get into the business of publishing vendor white […]

The Defend Trade Secrets Act Has Returned

Freedom to Tinker readers may recall that I’ve previously warned about legislation to create a federal private cause of action for trade secret misappropriation in the name of fighting cyber-espionage against United States businesses. Titled the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), it failed to move last year. Well, the concerning legislation has returned, and, although it has some changes, […]