November 27, 2024

Your TV is spying on you, and what you can do about it

A recent UK observer with a packet sniffer noticed that his LG “smart” TV was sending all his viewing habits back to an LG server. This included filenames from an external USB disk. Add this atop observations that Samsung’s 2012-era “smart” TVs were riddled with security holes. (No word yet on the 2013 edition.) What’s […]

A Good Day at the Googleplex

            Judge Chin has issued his decision in the Google Book Search case, and it’s a win for Google. For those of you who have been following the litigation, it’s been a long trip through the arcana of class certification. Today’s decision, however, finally gets to the merits of Google’s fair use defense under the […]

Inject New Energy into Problem Solving – Principle #8 for Fostering Civic Engagement Through Digital Technologies

In response to my recent post arguing that the Federal government needs to use the social web more effectively as a tool for improving information sharing between the Federal government and the public, Michael Herz from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law reached out and directed me to a comprehensive report he recently authored […]

Game Theory and Bitcoin

In light of the back-and-forth about the recent Eyal and Sirer (“ES”) paper about Bitcoin mining, I want to take a step back and talk about what a careful analysis of Bitcoin mining dynamics would look like. (Here are some previous posts if you need backstory: 1 2 3 4 5.) The key to a […]

Why the Cornell paper on Bitcoin mining is important

    Joint post with Andrew Miller, University of Maryland. Bitcoin is broken, claims a new paper by Cornell researchers Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer. No it isn’t, respond Bitcoiners. Yes it is, say the authors. Our own Ed Felten weighed in with a detailed analysis, refuting the paper’s claim that a coalition of […]