The most important copyright and educational fair use case in recent memory (mine, at least) was decided by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals last week. The case, Cambridge University Press v. Patton, challenged Georgia State University’s use of e-reserves in courses offered by the university. The copyrighted works at issue were scholarly books–i.e., a […]
POODLE and the fundamental market failure of browser security
October 20, 2014 by
Last week saw the public disclosure of the POODLE vulnerability, a practical attack allowing a network attacker to steal plaintext from HTTPS connections. In particular, this attack can be used to steal authentication cookies. It’s a bad vulnerability, and it particularly hurts because it should have been fixed long ago. It only affects the ancient SSL v3 protocol, which was […]
On the value of encrypting your phone
October 9, 2014 by
This is a true story. Yesterday my phone crashed, and it wouldn’t reboot. Actually it would do nothing but reboot, over and over, with a seemingly different error message every time. I tried all of the tricks available to a technically handy person, and nothing worked—I couldn’t get it out of the crash-reboot cycle. So […]
Guessing passwords with Apple’s full-device encryption
October 8, 2014 by
With the recently-introduced iOS 8, Apple has switched to a encrypting a much larger amount of user data by default. Matt Green has provided an excellent initial look at a technical level and big-picture level and Apple has recently released a slightly more detailed specification document and an admirable promise never to include backdoors. This move, and Google’s prompt promise […]
It’s time to bring Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies into the computer science curriculum
September 15, 2014 by
In the privacy technologies grad seminar that I taught last semester, Bitcoin proved to be the most popular topic among students. Two groups did very different and equally interesting final projects on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies; more on that below. More broadly, we’re seeing a huge demand for learning the computer science underlying Bitcoin, both at […]
