Last week the press reported that the White House will seek to redesign the NSA’s mass phone call data program, so that data will be held by the phone companies and accessed by the NSA, subject to a new warrant requirement. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will issue the warrants. Today Josh Kroll and I, […]
New research: Better wallet security for Bitcoin
March 28, 2014 by
[UPDATE (April 3, 2014): We’ve found an error in our paper. In the threshold signature scheme that we used, there are restrictions on the threshold value. In particular if the key is shared over a degree t polynomial, then 2t+1 players (not t+1) are required to to construct a signature. We thought that this could […]
Reflecting on Sunshine Week
March 26, 2014 by
Last Wednesday evening, I attended the D.C. Open Government Summit: Street View, which took place at the National Press Club in conjunction with Sunshine Week. The Summit was sponsored by the D.C. Open Government Coalition, a non-profit that “seeks to enhance the public’s access to government information and ensure the transparency of government operations of […]
Algorithms can be more accountable than people
March 19, 2014 by
At an academic meeting recently, I was surprised to hear some social scientists accept as obviously correct the claim that involving “algorithms” in decision-making, instead of sticking with good old-fashioned human decision-making, necessarily reduces accountability and increases the risk of bias. I tend to believe the opposite, that making processes algorithmic improves our ability to […]
Why Dorian Nakamoto Probably Isn't Satoshi
March 11, 2014 by
When Newsweek published its cover story last week claiming to have identified the creator of Bitcoin, I tweeted that I was reserving judgment on their claim, pending more evidence. At this point it looks like they don’t have more evidence to show us—and that Newsweek is probably wrong.
