Category: Professional
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It’s over. Isn’t it? Microsoft/Yahoo, continued
“It’s over. Isn’t it?” — the end of Killer Klowns from Outer Space Act 1 ended with a temporary resolution: Microsoft deciding not to “go hostile” and instead withdrawing their offer to buy Yahoo! After a brief intermission, Bill Gates’ announcement of Live Search Cashback is bang-up start to Act 2, featuring guest star Carl…
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CFP08: trip report
Part 1 of a series Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008 ended with me presenting Dear Potus 08 and circulating the letter to the presidential candidates for signatures, and then a closing plenary by Clay Shirky (notes below). It was exhiliarating as always, and I’m now simultaneously exhausting, revved up, and suffering from jet lag. So…
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Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008: showtime!
CFP2008 traditionally starts off with a day of tutorials. I was on a panel organized by Lillie Coney of EPIC on E-Deceptive Campaign Practices: “Elections 2.0″, which was extremely interesting; I discussed examples of, and responses to, e-deception based on my activism experiences this election season, much of which I’ve blogged about here already. Tova…
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E-Deceptive Campaign Practices: “Elections 2.0”
I’m at a tutorial on Tuesday discussing “elections 2.0” at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, and one of the things I want to cover is Web 2.0 technologies’ positive role in countering deceptive campaign practices. I’m planning on using some examples from the Obama activism work I’ve been doing on Facebook, as well as…
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Hillary Clinton Facebook group overrun by troll mob
The Hillary Clinton group got overrun with trolls last night. A Facebook bug — that’s been reported and unfixed since February — prevented the admins from being able to react. I saved a snapshot of a series of 25 threads with sexist (and in many cases racist) subjects; I won’t quote them, but trust me,…
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Clay Shirky to deliver closing plenary at CFP08!
From the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy blog: We are pleased to announce that Clay Shirky will deliver the closing plenary keynote at CFP Technology Policy ’08. Since the 1990s, Shirky has written, taught, and consulted on the social, cultural, and economic effects of Internet technologies and social media. His most recent book, Here Comes Everybody:…
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Allies in the blogosphere
There’s so much to write about for Angry Black Woman’s Carnival of Allies that it’s hard to know where to start. At first I thought of focusing on “why the usual excuses are not good enough.” As the month of April went on, though, with brownfemipower’s and Blackamazon’s final statements, the growing list of women…
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“9.5 Theses for Technology Policy in the Next Administration”
On the CFP08 blog, Laura DeNardis of the Yale Internet and Society Project writes: To help shape public debate in this election year, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School recommends the following policy principles – The 9.5 Theses for Technology Policy in the Next Administration The principles include Privacy, Access, Network Neutrality, Transparency,…
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Color me impressed …
Flying down to SF last Monday for RSA, I opened up my Macbook and got … nuthin’. Once I landed and plugged it in, and the little green light on the power supply connector didn’t even come on, I realized I was in trouble. So I headed down to the Mac store, conveniently right by…
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A bumper crop o’ Slashdot security threads
In RSA: “It feels like something’s missing” earlier this week, I mentioned that I found myself wondering whether what I was seeing at the show responded to security problems as experienced by users. Coincidentally enough, when I checked Slashdot today there were several of interesting security-related threads. So while it’s far from a statistically-valid sample,…
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RSA, part 2: static analysis
A continuation of RSA: “It feels like something’s missing” RSA’s a tough show for static analysis companies, but several were there. Ounce had the largest booth and an excellent message (“listen to your code”); Veracode, Armorize, and Fortify had smaller presence. However, I didn’t actually spend much time at the booths or looking at the…
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RSA: “It feels like something’s missing”
The last time I was at the RSA conference/expo in 2004, Bill Gates talked about PREfix and PREfast in his keynote — he even went off and started talking about Microsoft’s acquisition of PREfix! Hard to top that … but it’s a great place for shoozing and to get a feel for the market, so…
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Asbestos underwear, fair information principles, and security
Tales from the Net co-author Deborah Pierce’s Into the Lion’s Den — a privacy advocate’s work is never done (on her tribe.net blog) talks about a panel she was just on at ere expo, “the nation’s leading recruiting conference.” She was there for a debate with the CEO of a company whose mission is “to…
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Strategy, security, and static analysis: what’s next for me
Fourteen years ago today was my last day at Digital Equipment Corporation before leaving to work on the technology today became PREfix and the company I started with a few friends that became Intrinsa, so it seems especially appropriate to post about this today … I’m delighted to announce that I’m starting a part-time strategy…
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pwn2own: the stakes just got higher
Update, March 27: Macbook Air pwned and owned — in two minutes! Update, March 28: Vista laptop pwned via an Adobe Flash vulnerability. Update, April 16: Apple issues Safari patch. Props to the winners — and to Ubuntu Linux, which emerged unpwned!
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My new bio-in-progress, 2.0
It’s amusingly difficult for me to write professional biographies, especially for print publications. Not only do I have a hard time reducing my career to the paragraph you’re usually allowed, at some level it feels like it forces me to reify my identity. Nonetheless, it has to be done; right now, I’m on the hook…
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Intersectionality 2.0
I’ve been working on a couple a potential proposal a keynote for this year’s Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference related to the topic of intersectionality and social networks. Here’s an overview: Since first being developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1970s, theories of intersectionality have become a powerful lens for examining questions of race and…
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Indeed! The Economist on “computer science as a social science”
The Economist’s Technology Quarterly has an excellent article on Software bugtraps: software that makes software better. This is something of a followup to an article they did a few years ago; most people quoted think that the situation is improving, although of course as Capers Jones points out it depends on your metrics. And why…
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Facebook flakiness: reliability problems, or an attack?
Facebook once again is in the middle of major flakiness right now: links to nowhere, spontaneous logouts. The best thing to do when something like this happens is to treat it as a sign that it’s a good time to take a break from Facebook for a little while. So I decided to write this…
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Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008: call for proposals is up!
From the CFP2008 web page: This election year will be the first to address US technology policy in the information age as part of our national debate. Candidates have put forth positions about technology policy and have recognized that it has its own set of economic, political, and social concerns. In the areas of privacy,…