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 […]
What happens when responsible disclosure fails?
December 5, 2012 by
The topic of how to handle security vulnerabilities has been discussed for years. Wikipedia defines responsible disclosure as: Responsible disclosure is a computer security term describing a vulnerability disclosure model. It is like full disclosure, with the addition that all stakeholders agree to allow a period of time for the vulnerability to be patched before […]
No Longer Bit Players: Internet Governance & Economic Growth in Developing Countries
December 3, 2012 by
The 200 sovereign state members of the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will gather in Dubai this week for the World Conference of International Telecommunications (WCIT). The WCIT is a treaty developed to facilitate global interconnection and interoperability between telecommunications carriers. The treaty was last reviewed in 1988, an era where the majority of telecommunications networks […]
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 […]
My NYT Op-Ed: "Beware the Smart Campaign"
November 17, 2012 by
I just published a new opinion piece in the New York Times, entitled “Beware the Smart Campaign”. I react to the Obama campaign’s successful use of highly quantitative voter targeting that is inspired by “big data” commercial marketing techniques and implemented through state-of-the-art social science knowledge and randomized field experiments. In the op-ed, I wonder […]
