Last week Julian Sanchez urged Google to offer end-to-end encryption for GMail, so that your messages would be known to you and your browser (and your email correspondents) but not to Google itself. Julian explained why this would be a positive step for users and, arguably, for Google itself. Let’s talk about what would be […]
You found a security hole. Now what?
December 11, 2012 by
The recent conviction of Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer for identity theft and conspiracy has renewed interest in the question of what researchers should do when they find security vulnerabilities in popular products. See, for example, Matt Blaze’s op-ed on how the research community views these matters, and Weev’s own response. Weev and associates discovered a flaw […]
Facebook Copyright Statement: Not Entirely Silly
November 27, 2012 by
There’s a meme going around on Facebook, saying that you should post a certain legal incantation on your Facebook wall, to reclaim certain rights that Facebook would otherwise be taking from you. There’s an interesting counter-meme in the press now, saying that all of this is pointless and of course you can’t change your rights […]
Smart Campaigns, Meet Smart Voters
November 19, 2012 by
Zeynep pointed to her New York Times op-ed, “Beware the Smart Campaign,” about political campaigns collecting and exploiting detailed information about individual voters. Given the emerging conventional wisdom that the Obama campaign’s technological superiority played an important role in the President’s re-election, we should expect more aggressive attempts to micro-target voters by both parties in […]
The Silver Effect: What We Can Learn from Poll Aggregators
November 9, 2012 by
For those who now think Nate Silver is god, here’s a question: Can Nate Silver make a prediction so accurate that Nate Silver himself doesn’t believe it? Yes, he can–and he did. Silver famously predicted the results of Election 2012 correctly in every state. Yet while his per-state predictions added up to the 332 electoral […]
