A recent paper published by Smartmatic, a vendor of voting systems, caught my attention. The first thing is that it’s published by Springer, which typically publishes peer-reviewed articles – which this is not. This is a marketing piece. It’s disturbing that a respected imprint like Springer would get into the business of publishing vendor white […]
The Defend Trade Secrets Act Has Returned
August 3, 2015 by
Freedom to Tinker readers may recall that I’ve previously warned about legislation to create a federal private cause of action for trade secret misappropriation in the name of fighting cyber-espionage against United States businesses. Titled the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), it failed to move last year. Well, the concerning legislation has returned, and, although it has some changes, […]
Does cloud mining make sense?
August 3, 2015 by
[Paul Ellenbogen is a second year Ph.D. student at Princeton who’s been looking into the economics and game theory of Bitcoin, among other topics. He’s a coauthor of our recent paper on Namecoin and namespaces. — Arvind Narayanan] Currently, if I wanted to mine Bitcoin I would need to buy specialized hardware, called application-specific integrated […]
The Chilling Effects of Confidentiality Creep
August 1, 2015 by
Today, North Carolina’s Governor Pat McCrory has a bill on his desk that would make it impossible for the public to find out what entities are supplying the chemical cocktail – the drugs – to be used for lethal injections in North Carolina. Known as the Restoring Proper Justice Act (the “Act”), it defines “confidential […]
Analyzing the 2013 Bitcoin fork: centralized decision-making saved the day
July 28, 2015 by
On March 11, 2013, Bitcoin experienced a technical crisis. Versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the software diverged from each other in behavior due to a bug, causing the block chain to “fork” into two. Considering how catastrophic a hard fork can be, the crisis was resolved quickly with remarkably little damage owing to the exemplary […]
