This post was authored by Noah Apthorpe. On September 6, 2018, the California Legislature presented draft legislation to Governor Brown regarding security and authentication of Internet-connected devices. This legislation would extend California’s existing reasonable data security requirement—which already applies to online services—to Internet-connected devices. The intention of this legislation to prevent default passwords and […]
Serious design flaw in ESS ExpressVote touchscreen: “permission to cheat”
September 14, 2018 by
Kansas, Delaware, and New Jersey are in the process of purchasing voting machines with a serious design flaw, and they should reconsider while there is still time! Over the past 15 years, almost all the states have moved away from paperless touchscreen voting systems (DREs) to optical-scan paper ballots. They’ve done so because if a […]
Privacy, ethics, and data access: A case study of the Fragile Families Challenge
September 14, 2018 by
This blog post summarizes a paper describing the privacy and ethics process by which we organized the Fragile Families Challenge. The paper will appear in a special issue of the journal Socius. Academic researchers, companies, and governments holding data face a fundamental tension between risk to respondents and benefits to science. On one hand, these […]
Securing the Vote — National Academies report
September 11, 2018 by
In this November’s election, could a computer hacker, foreign or domestic, alter votes (in the voting machine) or prevent people from voting (by altering voter registrations)? What should we do to protect ourselves? The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have released a report, Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy about the cybervulnerabilities in U.S. election […]
Why PhD experiences are so variable and what you can do about it
September 4, 2018 by
People who do PhDs seem to have either strongly positive or strongly negative experiences — for some, it’s the best time of their lives, while others regret the decision to do a PhD. Few career choices involve such a colossal time commitment, so it’s worth thinking carefully about whether a PhD is right for you, […]
