GPT-3, a powerful, 175 billion parameter language model developed recently by OpenAI, has been galvanizing public debate and controversy. As the MIT Technology Review puts it: “OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindless”. Parts of the technology community hope (and fear) that GPT-3 could brings us one step closer to the hypothetical […]
Can the exfiltration of personal data by web trackers be stopped?
July 14, 2020 by
by Günes Acar, Steven Englehardt, and Arvind Narayanan. In a series of posts on this blog in 2017/18, we revealed how web trackers exfiltrate personal information from web pages, browser password managers, form inputs, and the Facebook Login API. Our findings resulted in many fixes and privacy improvements to browsers, websites, third parties, and privacy […]
Safely opening PDFs received by e-mail (or fax?!)
June 24, 2020 by
Many election administrators in U.S. states and counties need to receive and open PDF files from voters. Some of these administrators receive these PDFs as e-mail attachments. These may be filled-out voter registration forms, or even voted ballots from UOCAVA (overseas and military) voters. We all know that malware can lurk in e-mail attachments; how […]
NJ agrees No Internet voting in July, vague about November
June 20, 2020 by
A formal settlement agreement has been submitted to the NJ Superior Court regarding online ballot access in the 2020 elections. On May 4, 2020, New Jersey’s Division of Elections was caught trying to adopt vote-by-Internet on the stealth, even though the law forbids it. That is, not only is Internet voting inherently insecurable, there’s a […]
Democracy Live internet voting: unsurprisingly insecure, and surprisingly insecure
June 8, 2020 by
The OmniBallot internet voting system from Democracy Live finds surprising new ways to be insecure, in addition to the usual (severe, fatal) insecurities common to all internet voting systems. There’s a very clear scientific consensus that “the Internet should not be used for the return of marked ballots” because “no known technology guarantees the secrecy, security, and […]
