Professor Jonathan Zittrain is well-known for his concern that the general-purpose computer may be disappearing. The recent rise of app stores is putting his fears in a new light. After trading some thoughts about the issues in the blogosphere, he an…
Researchers have uncovered a major security flaw which allows outsiders to link a Skype account to a user’s download activity on BitTorrent. The exploit works without the knowledge of the victims and also allows outsiders to see the travel patterns of Skype users. The vulnerability opens the door for scammers to blackmail or defraud Internet users, the researchers say, and thus far Skype has shown no interest in releasing a fix.
Source: Security Flaw Links BitTorrent Users to Skype Accounts
Recently I wrote about my discovery that someone erased evidence on an election computer in Cumberland County, NJ. After something went wrong in a Primary Election in June 2011, the Superior Court (the Hon. David E. Krell) had ordered the County Boar…
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The Gusciora case was filed in 2004 by the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic on behalf of Reed Gusciora and other public-interest plaintiffs. The Plaintiffs sought to end the use of paperless direct-recording electronic voting machi…
This past week, the Dutch company DigiNotar admitted that their servers were hacked in June of 2011. DigiNotar is no ordinary company, and this was no ordinary hack. DigiNotar is one of the “certificate authorities” that has been entrusted by web bro…
Deloitte & Touche LLP v. Carlson, 2011 WL 2923865 (N.D. Ill. July 18, 2011) Defendant had risen to the level of Director of a large consulting and professional services firm. (There is some irony here – this case involves the destruction of electronic data, and defendant had been in charge of the firm’s security and [...]
Ann Kilzer, Arvind Narayanan, Ed Felten, Vitaly Shmatikov, and I have released a new research paper detailing the privacy risks posed by collaborative filtering recommender systems. To examine the risk, we use public data available from Hunch, Library…
Ann Kilzer, Arvind Narayanan, Ed Felten, Vitaly Shmatikov, and I have released a new research paper detailing the privacy risks posed by collaborative filtering recommender systems. To examine the risk, we use public data available from Hunch, Library…
Michael Geist has written a good article in the Ottawa Citizen disucssing why the proposed “lawful access” internet surveillance law should not be passed. From teh article: Lawful access raises genuine privacy and free speech concerns, particularly given the fact the government has never provided adequate evidence on the need for it, it has never [...]
Today, Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan revealed that Apple’s iPhone maintains an apparently indefinite log of its location history. To show the data available, they produced and demoed an application called iPhone Tracker for plotting these locations…