In a new paper to be presented next week at WEIS by Jeremy Clark, we discuss the challenges in designing truly decentralized prediction markets and order books. Prediction markets allow market participants to trade shares in future events (such as “Will the USA advance to the knockout stage of the 2014 World Cup?”) and turn […]
Cognitive disconnect: Understanding Facebook Connect login permissions
June 18, 2014 by
[Nicky Robinson is an undergraduate whose Junior Independent Work project, advised by Joseph Bonneau, turned into a neat research paper. — Arvind Narayanan] When you use the Facebook Connect [1] login system, another website may ask for permission to “post to Facebook for you.” But what does this message mean? If you click “Okay”, what […]
Bitcoin Mining Now Dominated by One Pool
June 16, 2014 by
The big news in the Bitcoin world, is that one entity, called GHash, seems to be in control of more than half of all of the mining power. A part of Bitcoin’s appeal has been its distributed nature: the idea that no one party is in control but the system operates through the cooperative action […]
Encryption as protest
June 10, 2014 by
As a computer scientist who studies Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, I remember my surprise when I first learned that some groups of people view and use them very differently than I’m used to. In computer science, PETs are used for protecting anonymity or confidentiality, often via application of cryptography, and are intended to be bullet-proof against an […]
Why King George III Can Encrypt
June 6, 2014 by
[This is a guest post by Wenley Tong, Sebastian Gold, Samuel Gichohi, Mihai Roman, and Jonathan Frankle, undergraduates in the Privacy Technologies seminar that I offered for the second time in Spring 2014. They did an excellent class project on the usability of email encryption.] PGP and similar email encryption standards have existed since the early […]
