What will artificial intelligence mean for society, jobs, and the economy? Speaking today at Princeton University is Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer of Microsoft. I was in the audience and live-blogged Brad’s talk. CITP director Ed Felten introduces Brad’s lecture by saying that the tech industry is at a crossroads. With the rise […]
No boundaries for credentials: New password leaks to Mixpanel and Session Replay Companies
February 26, 2018 by
In this installment of the “No Boundaries” series we show how wholesale collection of user interactions by third-party analytics and session replay scripts cause inadvertent collection of passwords. By Steve Englehardt, Gunes Acar and Arvind Narayanan Following the recent report that Mixpanel, a popular analytics provider, had been inadvertently collecting passwords that users typed into […]
Blockchain: What is it good for?
February 26, 2018 by
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are surrounded by world-historic levels of hype and snake oil. For people like me who take the old-fashioned view that technical claims should be backed by sound arguments and evidence, it’s easy to fall into the trap of concluding that there is no there there–and that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are fundamentally useless. […]
How Tech is Failing Victims of Intimate Partner Violence: Thomas Ristenpart at CITP
February 23, 2018 by
What technology risks are faced by people who experience intimate partner violence? How is the security community failing them, and what questions might we need to ask to make progress on social and technical interventions? Speaking Tuesday at CITP was Thomas Ristenpart (@TomRistenpart), an associate professor at Cornell Tech and a member of the Department […]
Are voting-machine modems truly divorced from the Internet?
February 22, 2018 by
(This article is written jointly with my colleague Kyle Jamieson, who specializes in wireless networks.) [See also: The myth of the hacker-proof voting machine] The ES&S model DS200 optical-scan voting machine has a cell-phone modem that it uses to upload election-night results from the voting machine to the “county central” canvassing computer. We know it’s […]
