Category: Uncategorized
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Adam Thierer on the First Amendment Twilight Zone
Thursday’s lunch talk here at CITP was by my co-blogger Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Adam is a leading voice in the debate over online free speech, with a particular focus on how to protect children from harmful online material while preserving First Amendment freedoms. In his lunch talk, Adam focused on…
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Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners
Today Will Clarkson, Tim Weyrich, Adam Finkelstein, Nadia Heninger, Alex Halderman and I released a paper, Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners. The paper will appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, in May 2009. Here’s the paper’s abstract: This paper presents a novel technique for authenticating physical documents based…
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Government Online: Outreach vs. Transparency
These days everybody in Washington seems to be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. The latest jumpers are four House committees, according to Tech Daily Dose. The committees, like a growing number of individual members’ offices, plan to use Twitter as a new tool to reach their audience and ensure transparency between the government and the…
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Kundra Named As Federal CIO
Today, the Obama administration named Vivek Kundra as the Chief Information Officer of the U.S. government, a newly created position. This is great news. Kundra, in his previous role as CTO of the District of Columbia, made great strides in opening the DC government by publishing government data. When he spoke at our Thursday Forum…
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New Podcast: CITP Conversations
Over the last few months, as the pace of activity at CITP has increased, we’ve fielded a growing number of requests from points around the web, and around the world, for podcasts and other ways to “attend” our events virtually. We hear you, and we’re working on it. Today, I’m very pleased to announce a…
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RIP Rocky Mountain News
The Rocky Morning News, Colorado’s oldest newspaper, closed its doors Friday. On their front page they have this incredibly touching video: Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo. The closing of a large institution like a daily newspaper is an incredibly sad event, and my heart goes out to all the people who suddenly find…
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The Future of Smartphone Platforms
In 1985, I got my very first home computer: a Commodore Amiga 1000. At the time, it was awesome: great graphics, great sound, “real” multitasking, and so forth. Never mind that you spent half your life shuffling floppy disks around. Never mind that I kept my head full of Epson escape codes to use with…
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Federal Health IT Effort Is Making Progress, Could Benefit from More Transparency
President Obama has indicated that health information technology (HIT) is an important component of his administration’s health care goals. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have lauded the potential for HIT to reduce costs and improve care. In this post, I’ll give some basics about what HIT is, what work is underway, and how…
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Hulu abandons Boxee—now what?
In our last installment, I detailed the trials and tribulations of my attempt to integrate legal, Internet-sourced video into my home theater via a hacked AppleTV, running Boxee, getting its feed from Hulu. One day later (!), Hulu announced it was all over. Later this week, Hulu’s content will no longer be available through Boxee.…
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TiVo, AppleTV, Boxee, and the future of HD television delivery
I don’t watch as much TV as I once did. Yet, I’m still paying Comcast every month, as they’re the only provider who will sell me HD service compatible with my TiVo-HD. Sadly, Comcast is far from ideal. I’m regularly frustrated at their inability to debug their signal quality problems. (My ABC-HD and PBS-HD signals…