The big news in the Bitcoin world, is that one entity, called GHash, seems to be in control of more than half of all of the mining power. A part of Bitcoin’s appeal has been its distributed nature: the idea that no one party is in control but the system operates through the cooperative action […]
Mesh Networks Won't Fix Internet Security
April 22, 2014 by
There’s no doubt that the quality of tech reporting in major newspapers has improved in recent years. It’s rare these days to see a story in, say, the New York Times whose fundamental technical premise is wrong. Still, it does happen occasionally—as it did yesterday. Yesterday’s Times ran a story gushing about mesh networks as […]
How to protect yourself from Heartbleed
April 9, 2014 by
The Heartbleed vulnerability is one of the worst Internet security problems we have seen. I’ll be writing more about what we can learn from Heartbleed and the response to it. For now, here is a quick checklist of what you can do to protect yourself.
Secure protocols for accountable warrant execution
April 2, 2014 by
Last week the press reported that the White House will seek to redesign the NSA’s mass phone call data program, so that data will be held by the phone companies and accessed by the NSA, subject to a new warrant requirement. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will issue the warrants. Today Josh Kroll and I, […]
Algorithms can be more accountable than people
March 19, 2014 by
At an academic meeting recently, I was surprised to hear some social scientists accept as obviously correct the claim that involving “algorithms” in decision-making, instead of sticking with good old-fashioned human decision-making, necessarily reduces accountability and increases the risk of bias. I tend to believe the opposite, that making processes algorithmic improves our ability to […]
