The discovery last week that Lenovo laptops had been shipping with preinstalled adware that left users wide open to security exploitation triggered a lot of righteous anger in the tech community. David Auerbach at Slate wrote that Lenovo had “betrayed its customers and sold out their security”. Whenever a big company does something so monumentally […]
Archives for 2015
In Partial Defense of the Seahawks' Play Calling
February 2, 2015 by
The conventional wisdom about last night’s Super Bowl is that the Seahawks made a game-losing mistake by running a passing play from the Patriots’ one yard line in the closing seconds. Some are calling it the worst Super Bowl play call ever. I disagree. I won’t claim it was the right call, but I do […]
Nine awesome Bitcoin projects at Princeton
January 30, 2015 by
As promised, here are the final project presentations from the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies class I taught at Princeton. I encouraged students to build something real, rather than toy class projects, and they delivered. I hope you’ll find these presentations interesting and educational, and that you build on the work presented here (I’ve linked to the projects […]
Android WebView security and the mobile advertising marketplace
January 28, 2015 by
Freedom to Tinker readers are probably aware of the current controversy over Google’s handling of ongoing security vulnerabilities in its Android WebView component. What sounds at first like a routine security problem turns out to have some deep challenges. Let’s start by filling in some background and build up to the big problem they’re not […]
Sign up now for the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies online course
January 23, 2015 by
At Princeton I taught a course on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies during the semester that just ended. Joe Bonneau unofficially co-taught it with me. Based on student feedback and what we accomplished in the course, it was extremely successful. Next week I’ll post videos of all the final project presentations. The course was based on […]
