[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, […]
Bitcoin and game theory: we’re still scratching the surface
March 31, 2015 by
In an earlier post I argued why Bitcoin’s stability is fundamentally a game-theoretic proposition, and ended with some questions: Can we effectively model the system with all its interacting components in the language of strategies and payoff-maximization? Is the resulting model tractable — can we analyze it mathematically or using simulations? And most importantly, do […]
Be wary of one-time pads and other crypto unicorns
March 25, 2015 by
Yesterday, a new messaging app called Zendo got some very favorable coverage from Tech Crunch. At the core of their sales pitch is the fact that they use one-time pads for encryption. With a few strong assumptions, namely that the pads are truly random and are only used once, it’s true that this scheme is “unbreakable” […]
Why Your Netflix Traffic is Slow, and Why the Open Internet Order Won't (Necessarily) Make It Faster
March 25, 2015 by
The FCC recently released the Open Internet Order, which has much to say about “net neutrality” whether (and in what circumstances) an Internet service provider is permitted to prioritize traffic. I’ll leave more detailed thoughts on the order itself to future posts; in this post, I would like to clarify what seems to be a […]
