Guarding against the possible Spectre in every machine
Security vulnerabilities in technology extend well beyond problems with software. Earlier this month, researchers revealed that the hardware at the heart of nea…
Publication
Copyright, The First Wave of Internet Censorship
When someone wants to remove speech from the Internet, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) notice and takedown process can provide the quickest path.…
American Democracy Is an Easy Target
The American foreign-policy community has spent the past year arguing about how to counter Russian influence operations. Newspapers such as the New York Times h…
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans
This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by envir…
Now we can cheaply sequence DNA, how do we store all that data?
In 2003, the international consortium of scientists working on the Human Genome Project completed the final first draft for the human genome - a DNA blueprint f…
Website operators are in the dark about privacy violations by third-party scripts
by Steven Englehardt, Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan. Recently we revealed that “session replay” scripts on websites record everything you do, like someone l…
EFF to Court: Don’t Let Trolls Get Away With Asserting Stupid Software Patents
If trolls don’t face consequences for asserting invalid software patents, then they will continue to shake down productive companies. That is why EFF has filed…
Judicial Nominee Howard C. Nielson’s Own Torture Memo
UPDATED 1/4: A number of President Trump’s judicial nominations have collapsed in recent days after the candidates’ utter lack of qualifications was revealed,…
Here’s how Google is helping, not hurting, democracy
Sean Richey and J. Benjamin Taylor have a new book on how Google searches affect democratic knowledge, “Google and Democracy: Politics and the Power of the Inte…
Three Questions on the WannaCry Attribution to North Korea
The Trump Administration this week formally accused the North Korean government of responsibility for the WannaCry ransomware attacks that hobbled hundreds of t…
The benefits of police body cams are a myth
In the three years since Michael Brown’s fatal shooting in Ferguson, police body-worn cameras have been sold to the public as a tool that would primarily deter…
How Facebook Stymies Social Science
What exactly was the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 election campaign? How widespread was its infiltration of social media? And how much influence did i…