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CITP Seeks Visiting Faculty, Scholars or Policy Experts for 2010-2011

February 4, 2010 by

The Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University seeks candidates for positions as visiting faculty members or researchers, or postdoctoral research associates for the 2010-2011 academic year.

About CITP

Digital technologies and public life are constantly reshaping each other—from net neutrality and broadband adoption, to copyright and file sharing, to electronic voting and beyond.

Realizing digital technology’s promise requires a constant sharing of ideas, competencies and norms among the technical, social, economic and political domains.

The Center for Information Technology Policy is Princeton University’s effort to meet this challenge. Its new home, which opened in September 2008, is a state of the art facility designed from the ground up for openness and collaboration. Located at the intellectual and physical crossroads of Princeton’s engineering and social science communities, the Center’s research, teaching and public programs are building the intellectual and human capital that our technological future demands.

To see what this mission can mean in practice, take a look at our website, at http://citp.princeton.edu.

About the Search

The Center has secured limited resources from a range of sources to support visiting faculty, scholars or policy experts for up to one-year appointments during the 2010-2011 academic year. We are interested in applications from academic faculty and researchers as well as from individuals who have practical experience in the policy arena. The rank and status of the successful applicant(s) will be determined on a case-by-case basis. We are particularly interested in hearing from faculty members at other universities and from individuals who have first-hand experience in public service in the technology policy area.

The successful applicant(s) will conduct research, engage in public programs, and may teach a seminar during their appointment subject to review and approval by the Dean of the Faculty. They’ll play an important role at a pivotal time in the development of this new center. They may be appointed to a visiting faculty or visiting fellow position, a term-limited research position, or a postdoctoral appointment, depending on qualifications.

We are happy to hear from anyone who works at the intersection of digital technology and public life. In addition to our existing strengths in computer science and sociology, we are particularly interested in identifying engineers, economists, lawyers, civil servants and policy analysts whose research interests are complementary to our existing activities.

If you are interested, please submit a CV and cover letter, stating background, intended research, and salary requirements, to https://jobs.princeton.edu.

Princeton University is an equal opportunity employer and complies with applicable EEO and affirmative action regulations. For information about applying to Princeton and voluntarily self-identifying, please see http://www.princeton.edu/dof/about_us/dof_job_openings/

Deadline: March 1, 2010.

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iPad to Test Zittrain's "Future of the Internet" Thesis

February 4, 2010 by

Jonathan Zittrain famously argued in his book “The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It” that we were headed for a future in which general purpose computers would be replaced by locked-down computing appliances.

Apple’s new iPad will put Zittrain’s thesis to the test. The iPad, as announced, has aspects of both an appliance and a general purpose computer. (Zittrain would say “generative”, but I’ll stick with the standard computer science term “general purpose”.) Will the appliance side kill the general-purpose side?

The iPad is an appliance in the sense that it runs applications from Apple’s App Store. The App Store is a “walled garden” containing only apps that have been approved by Apple. Apple has systematically refused to approve certain types of apps, and it has subjected apps to a vetting process that can be slow and mystifying. To the extent that Apple refuses broad categories of apps, this is an appliance approach to computing.

On the other hand, the iPad has a web browser. Modern browsers have become general-purpose platforms for delivering a broad class of applications. Pair a Bluetooth keyboard to your iPad, fire up the browser, and you have a fancy netbook — a general-purpose device that can run applications of any type.

For the iPad to become a Zittrain-type appliance, two things must happen. First, Apple must remain picky about which apps are available in the App Store. Second, Apple must limit the device’s browser so that it lacks the features that make today’s browsers viable application platforms. Will Apple be able to limit their product in this way, despite competition from other, more general-purpose tablets? I doubt it.

But even this — even an appliance-style iPad — would not be enough to prove Zittrain’s thesis. Zittrain argued not just that appliances would exist, but that they would replace general purpose computers. Amazon’s kindle is an appliance, but it doesn’t prove Zittrain’s thesis because nobody is ditching their laptop in favor of a Kindle. Instead, the Kindle is an extra device which is used for its purpose, while the general-purpose device is used for everything else. If the iPad ends up like the Kindle — a complement to the laptop or netbook, rather than a replacement for it — this will not prove Zittrain’s thesis.

It seems unlikely, then, that the iPad, even if it succeeds, will provide strong support for Zittrain’s thesis. General-purpose computers are so useful that we’re not likely to abandon them.

UPDATE: A few minutes after posting this, I saw that Zittrain had published his own take on this question.

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Census of Files Available via BitTorrent

January 29, 2010 by

BitTorrent is popular because it lets anyone distribute large files at low cost. Which kinds of files are available on BitTorrent? Sauhard Sahi, a Princeton senior, decided to find out. Sauhard’s independent work last semester, under my supervision, set out to measure what was available on BitTorrent. This post, summarizing his results, was co-written by Sauhard and me.

Sauhard chose a (uniform) random sample of files available via the trackerless variant of BitTorrent, using the Mainline DHT. The sample comprised 1021 files. He classified the files in the sample by file type, language, and apparent copyright status.

Before describing the results, we need to offer two caveats. First, the results apply only to the Mainline trackerless BitTorrent system that we surveyed. Other parts of the BitTorrent ecosystem might be different. Second, all files that were available were equally likely to appear in the sample — the sample was not weighted by number of downloads, and it probably contains files that were never downloaded at all. So we can’t say anything about the characteristics of BitTorrent downloads, or even of files that are downloaded via BitTorrent, only about files that are available on BitTorrent.

With that out of the way, here’s what Sauhard found.

File types

46% movies and shows (non-pornographic)
14% games and software
14% pornography
10% music
1% books and guides
1% images
14% could not classify

Movies/Shows

For the movies and shows category, the predominant file format was AVI, and other formats included RMVB (a proprietary format for RealPlayer), MPEG, raw DVD, and some multi-part RAR archives. Interestingly, this section was heavily biased towards recent movies, instead of being spread out evenly over a number of years. In descending order of frequency, we found that 60% of the randomly selected movies and shows were in English, 8% were in Spanish, 7% were in Russian, 5% were in Polish, 5% were in Japanese, 4% were in Chinese, 4% could not be determined, 3% were in French, 1% were in Italian, and other infrequent languages accounted for 2% of the distribution.

Games/Software

For the games and software category, there was no clearly dominant file type, but common file types for software included ISO disc images, multi-part RAR archives, and EXE (Windows executables). The games were targeted for running on different architectures, such as the XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii, and Windows PC’s. In descending order, we found that 74% of games and software in the sample were in English, 12% were in Japanese, 5% were in Spanish, 4% were in Chinese, 2% were in Polish, and 1% were in Russian and French each.

Pornography

For the pornography category, the predominant encoding format was AVI, similar to the movies category. However, there were significantly more MPG and WMV (Windows Media Video) files available. Also, most pornography torrents included the full pornographic video, a sample of the video (a 1-5 minute extract of the video), as well as posters or images of the porn stars in JPEG format. Also, as these videos are not typically dated like movies are, it is difficult to make any remarks regarding the recency bias for pornographic torrents. Our assumption would be that demand for pornography is not as time-sensitive as demand for movies, so it is likely that these pornographic videos constitute a broader spectrum of time than the movies do. In descending order, we found that 53% of pornography in our sample was in English, 16% was in Chinese, 15% was in Japanese, 6% was in Russian, 3% was in German, 2% was in French, 2% was unclassifiable, and Italian, Hindi, and Spanish appeared infrequently (1% each).

Music

For the music category, the predominant encoding format for music was MP3, there were some albums ripped to WMA (Windows Media Audio, a Microsoft codec), and there were also ISO images and multi-part RAR archives. There is still a bias towards recent albums and songs, but it is not as strongly evident as it is for movies—perhaps because people are more willing to continue seeding music even after it is no longer new, so these torrents are able to stay alive longer in the DHT. In descending order, we found that 78% of music torrents in our sample were in English, 6% were in Russian, 4% were in Spanish, 2% were in Japanese and Chinese each, and other infrequent languages appeared 1% each.

Books/Guides

The books/guides and images categories were fairly minor. We classified 15 torrents under books and guides—13 were in English, 1 was in French, and 1 was in Russian. We classified 3 image torrents—one was a set of national park wallpapers, one was a set of pictures of BMW cars (both of these are English), and one was a Japanese comic strip.

Apparent Copyright Infringement

Our final assessment involved determining whether or not each file seemed likely to be copyright-infringing. We classified a file as likely non-infringing if it appeared to be (1) in the public domain, (2) freely available through legitimate channels, or (3) user-generated content. These were judgment calls on our part, based on the contents of the files, together with some external research.

By this definition, all of the 476 movies or TV shows in the sample were found to be likely infringing. We found seven of the 148 files in the games and software category to be likely non-infringing—including two Linux distributions, free plug-in packs for games, as well as free and beta software. In the pornography category, one of the 145 files claimed to be an amateur video, and we gave it the benefit of the doubt as likely non-infringing. All of the 98 music torrents were likely infringing. Two of the fifteen files in the books/guides category seemed to be likely non-infringing.

Overall, we classified ten of the 1021 files, or approximately 1%, as likely non-infringing, This result should be interpreted with caution, as we may have missed some non-infringing files, and our sample is of files available, not files actually downloaded. Still, the result suggests strongly that copyright infringement is widespread among BitTorrent users.

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Information Technology Policy in the Obama Administration, One Year In

January 27, 2010 by

[Last year, I wrote an essay for Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, summarizing the technology policy challenges facing the incoming Obama Administration. This week they published my follow-up essay, looking back on the Administration’s first year. Here it is.]

Last year I identified four information technology policy challenges facing the incoming Obama Administration: improving cybersecurity, making government more transparent, bringing the benefits of technology to all, and bridging the culture gap between techies and policymakers. On these issues, the Administration’s first-year record has been mixed. Hopes were high that the most tech-savvy presidential campaign in history would lead to an equally transformational approach to governing, but bold plans were ground down by the friction of Washington.

Cybersecurity : The Administration created a new national cybersecurity coordinator (or “czar”) position but then struggled to fill it. Infighting over the job description — reflecting differences over how to reconcile security with other economic goals — left the czar relatively powerless. Cyberattacks on U.S. interests increased as the Adminstration struggled to get its policy off the ground.

Government transparency: This has been a bright spot. The White House pushed executive branch agencies to publish more data about their operations, and created rules for detailed public reporting of stimulus spending. Progress has been slow — transparency requires not just technology but also cultural changes within government — but the ship of state is moving in the right direction, as the public gets more and better data about government, and finds new ways to use that data to improve public life.

Bringing technology to all: On the goal of universal access to technology, it’s too early to tell. The FCC is developing a national broadband plan, in hopes of bringing high-speed Internet to more Americans, but this has proven to be a long and politically difficult process. Obama’s hand-picked FCC chair, Julius Genachowski, inherited a troubled organization but has done much to stabilize it. The broadband plan will be his greatest challenge, with lobbyists on all sides angling for advantage as our national network expands.

Closing the culture gap: The culture gap between techies and policymakers persists. In economic policy debates, health care and the economic crisis have understandably taken center stage, but there seems to be little room even at the periphery for the innovation agenda that many techies had hoped for. The tech policy discussion seems to be dominated by lawyers and management consultants, as in past Administrations. Too often, policymakers still see techies as irrelevant, and techies still see policymakers as clueless.

In recent days, creative thinking on technology has emerged from an unlikely source: the State Department. On the heels of Google’s surprising decision to back away from the Chinese market, Secretary of State Clinton made a rousing speech declaring Internet freedom and universal access to information as important goals of U.S. foreign policy. This will lead to friction with the Chinese and other authoritarian governments, but our principles are worth defending. The Internet can a powerful force for transparency and democratization, around the world and at home.

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Software in dangerous places

January 26, 2010 by

Software increasingly manages the world around us, in subtle ways that are often hard to see. Software helps fly our airplanes (in some cases, particularly military fighter aircraft, software is the only thing keeping them in the air). Software manages our cars (fuel/air mixture, among other things). Software manages our electrical grid. And, closer to home for me, software runs our voting machines and manages our elections.

Sunday’s NY Times Magazine has an extended piece about faulty radiation delivery for cancer treatment. The article details two particular fault modes: procedural screwups and software bugs.

The procedural screwups (e.g., treating a patient with stomach cancer with a radiation plan intended for somebody else’s breast cancer) are heartbreaking because they’re something that could be completely eliminated through fairly simple mechanisms. How about putting barcodes on patient armbands that are read by the radiation machine? “Oops, you’re patient #103 and this radiation plan is loaded for patent #319.”

The software bugs are another matter entirely. Supposedly, medical device manufacturers, and software correctness people, have all been thoroughly indoctrinated in the history of Therac-25, a radiation machine from the mid-80’s whose poor software engineering (and user interface design) directly led to several deaths. This article seems to indicate that those lessons were never properly absorbed.

What’s perhaps even more disturbing is that nobody seems to have been deeply bothered when the radiation planning software crashed on them! Did it save their work? Maybe you should double check? Ultimately, the radiation machine just does what it’s told, and the software than plans out the precise dosing pattern is responsible for getting it right. Well, if that software is unreliable (which the article clearly indicates), you shouldn’t use it again until it’s fixed!

What I’d like to know more about, and which the article didn’t discuss at all, is what engineering processes, third-party review processes, and certification processes were used. If there’s anything we’ve learned about voting systems, it’s that the federal and state certification processes were not up to the task of identifying security vulnerabilities, and that the vendors had demonstrably never intended their software to resist the sorts of the attacks that you would expect on an election system. Instead, we’re told that we can rely on poll workers following procedures correctly. Which, of course, is exactly what the article indicates is standard practice for these medical devices. We’re relying on the device operators to do the right thing, even when the software is crashing on them, and that’s clearly inappropriate.

Writing “correct” software, and further ensuring that it’s usable, is a daunting problem. In the voting case, we can at least come up with procedures based on auditing paper ballots, or using various cryptographic techniques, that allow us to detect and correct flaws in the software (although getting such procedures adopted is a daunting problem in its own right, but that’s a story for another day). In the aviation case, which I admit to not knowing much about, I do know they put in sanity-checking software, that will detect when the the more detailed algorithms are asking for something insane and will override it. For medical devices like radiation machines, we clearly need a similar combination of mechanisms, both to ensure that operators don’t make avoidable mistakes, and to ensure that the software they’re using is engineered properly.

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