It has been said that privacy is “at risk of becoming a real human right.” The exponential increase of personal information in the hands of organizations, particularly sensitive data, creates a significant rise in the perils accompanying formerly negligible privacy incidents. At one time considered too intangible to merit even token compensation, risks of harm […]
Archives for April 2016
Apple Encryption Saga and Beyond: What U.S. Courts Can Learn from Canadian Caselaw
April 21, 2016 by
The Defend Trade Secrets Act and Whistleblowers
April 20, 2016 by
As Freedom to Tinker readers know, I’ve been an active opponent of the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA). Though my position on the DTSA remains unchanged, I was both surprised and pleased to see that the revised Defend Trade Secrets Act now includes a narrow, but potentially useful, provision intended to protect whistleblowers from trade secret […]
Internet Voting? Really?
April 18, 2016 by
Recently I gave a TEDx talk—I spoke at the local Princeton University TEDx event. My topic was voting: America’s voting systems in the 19th and 20th century, and should we vote using the Internet? You can see the talk here:
On distracted driving and required phone searches
April 15, 2016 by
A recent Arstechnica article discussed several U.S. states that are considering adding a “roadside textalyzer” that operates analogously to roadside Breathalyzer tests. In the same way that alcohol and drugs can impair a driver’s ability to navigate the road, so can paying attention to your phone rather than the world beyond. Many states “require” drivers to consent […]
Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services
April 14, 2016 by
[This is a guest post by Vitaly Shmatikov, professor at Cornell Tech and once upon a time my adviser at the University of Texas at Austin. — Arvind Narayanan.] TL;DR: short URLs produced by bit.ly, goo.gl, and similar services are so short that they can be scanned by brute force. Our scan discovered a large […]
