National media reported yesterday that a Congressional agreement has been reached on so-called “fast track” authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). This international agreement, having been negotiated under extreme secrecy by 12 countries including the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore, is supposed to be an “ambitious, next-generation, Asia-Pacific trade agreement that reflects […]
Bitcoin is a game within a game
April 17, 2015 by
In this series on Bitcoin and game theory, I’ve argued that Bitcoin’s stability is fundamentally a game-theoretic proposition and shown how we’ve had blind spots for years in our theoretical understanding of mining strategy. In this post, I’ll get to the question of the discrepancy between theory and practice. As I pointed out, even though […]
Decertifying the worst voting machine in the US
April 15, 2015 by
On Apr 14 2015, the Virginia State Board of Elections immediately decertified use of the AVS WinVote touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine. This seems pretty minor, but it received a tremendous amount of pushback from some local election officials. In this post, I’ll explain how we got to that point, and what the […]
Scan This or Scan Me? User Privacy & Barcode-Scanning Applications
April 6, 2015 by
[Please welcome guest bloggers Eric Smith and Nina Kollars. Eric Smith serves as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for a higher ed consortium with membership consisting of Bucknell University, Franklin & Marshall College and Susquehanna University. Nina Kollars is assistant professor of government at Franklin & Marshall college, where her scholarship examines the ways […]
Where is Internet Congestion Occurring?
April 2, 2015 by
In my post last week, I explained how Netflix traffic was experiencing congestion along end-to-end paths to broadband Internet subscribers, and how the resulting congestion was slowing down traffic to many Internet destinations. Although Netflix and Comcast ultimately mitigated this particular congestion episode by connecting directly to one another in a contractual arrangement known as paid peering, […]
