The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its
weekly lunch seminar:

CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 30 April 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Topic: Digital Natives and Privacy: Recorded, always and forever?
Speaker: Miriam Simun, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

As Digital Natives navigate their lives–both online and off–they
leave behind multitude of digital tracks. Young people today are
growing up with an unprecedented amount of data being recorded and
collected about them. Movements are captured by security cameras in
the street, locations are easily tracked via the GPS on cell phones,
and youth themselves are sharing details of their private lives with
friends, strangers, and service providers through a number of web and
mobile technologies. As young people grown up digital, they are
blurring the boundaries public and private. Do Digital Natives have a
fundamentally different approach to privacy? How does both the
physical and online environment impact the ways in which young people
think about privacy? What are the implications of growing up in a
society where everything is recorded? What are the benefits and
concerns raised with the emerging “culture of sharing”? How can
education, technical and legal architecture begin to address these
issues?

Miriam Simun is the research coordinator on the Digital Natives project
at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
Her research interests include emerging social practices with digital
media, the role of technical architecture in new modes of social
interaction, and gender online. Prior to joining Berkman, Miriam
conducted research on the social effects of Mp3 player use in urban
spaces, and the impact of community leadership programs serving at-risk
youth. She holds a BSc in Sociology with a concentration in
Information Communication Technologies from the London School of
Economics.

(more…)

The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its
weekly lunch seminar:

CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 23 April 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Topic: Spatial Computing and the Challenge of Engineered Emergence
Speaker: Jacob Beal, MIT

Spatial Computing and the Challenge of Engineered Emergence

As the density of computing devices in our environment increases, it
becomes reasonable to think of them in aggregate as a “spatial
computer”—a collection of devices that fill a space, where the
difficulty of moving information between devices is strongly dependent
on the distance between them. Programming a spatial computer using
conventional methods is difficult due to its scale and
decentralization, but in biology we find many examples, like flocking
birds and developing embryos, where local interactions produce robust
global behaviors. We aim to solve spatial computing problems by
establishing engineering control over such emergent behaviors,
following a two-part strategy. First, application design can be
decoupled from networking details by programming the space, rather
than the network. We have created a language, Proto, takes global
programs for a continuous space abstraction and compiles them to local
programs that cause a network of devices to approximate the specified
global behavior. Second, we are building a library of Proto programs
which capture emergent phenomena as components that can be hooked
together to produce predictable behavior. Together, these allow us to
solve many problems in sensor networks and distributed robotics using
only a few dozen lines of code.

Bio:
Jacob Beal is a postdoctoral associate in the Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, where he recently completed
his Ph.D. under Prof. Gerald Jay Sussman. His research interests
center on the engineering of robust adaptive systems, with a focus on
problems of system integration for human-level intelligence and on
problems of modelling and control for spatially-distributed networks
like sensor networks, robotic swarms, and cells during morphogenesis.

(more…)

The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its
weekly lunch seminar:

CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date:  Wednesday, 16 April 2008
Time:  12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Topic: Accountable Anonymity
Speaker: Apu Kapadia (PhD UIUC 2005)

IMPORTANT NOTE:  If anyone would like to meet with Apu outside
of the talk on 4/16, please contact Evie (etaylor@seas.harvard.edu)
and we will set up a meeting.

ABSTRACT:
Anonymizing networks such as Tor allow users to access Internet
services privately using a series of routers to hide the client’s IP
address from the server. Tor’s success, however, has been limited by
users employing this anonymity for abusive purposes, such as defacing
Wikipedia. Website administrators rely on IP-address blocking for
disabling access to misbehaving users, but this method is not
practical if the abuser routes through Tor. As a result,
administrators block all Tor exit nodes, denying anonymous access to
honest and dishonest users alike. A few bad apples spoil the fun for
everybody.

To address this problem, we present a low-overhead credential system
called Nymble to provide “anonymous blacklisting.” With Nymble, (1)
honest users remain anonymous; (2) a server can complain and blacklist
an anonymous user to recognize future connections from that user; and
(3) users are aware of their blacklist status and can thus choose to
remain anonymous by not accessing the service. As a result of these
properties, our system is agnostic to servers’ varying definitions of
misbehavior—servers can blacklist any user, for whatever reason, and
users need not worry about a reduction in privacy from such
blacklisting.

BIOGRAPHY:
Apu Kapadia received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in October 2005. For his
dissertation research on trustworthy communication, Apu received a
four-year High-Performance Computer Science Fellowship from the
Department of Energy.  Following his doctorate, Apu joined Dartmouth
College as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Institute for
Security Technology Studies (ISTS). He is interested in topics related
to systems security and privacy. He is particularly interested in
accountable anonymity, privacy-enhancing technologies such as
anonymizing networks, usable models and policy languages for privacy,
and applied cryptography.

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~akapadia/

Come hear two talks for the Price of One! Simson Garfinkel presents
two short papers on privacy and security:

CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 9 April 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 319
Speaker: Simson Garfinkel

1. IRBs and Security Research: Myths, Facts and Mission Creep

Having decided to focus attention on the “weak link” of human
fallibility, a growing number of security researchers are discovering
the US Government’s regulations that govern human subject research.
This talk discusses those regulations, their application to research
on security and usability, and presents strategies for negotiating the
Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval process. It argues that a
strict interpretation of regulations has the potential to stymie
security research.

2. Cell Phones and Privacy: What’s the current state of Law and Technology

Cell phone privacy has gone far beyond the occasional eavesdropping.
Today cell phones are being used as location wireless tracking devices
for criminals, delivery services, and even children. Meanwhile the
cellphone itself, crammed with personal information, has become an
important platform for exploitation and computer forensics.

Simson L. Garfinkel is a fellow at the Center for Research on
Computation and Society and an Associate Professor at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. In addition to his academic work,
Garfinkel has written for several national magazines and papers,
authored or co-authored 14 books, and is a founder of Sandstorm
Enterprises, a computer security firm that develops advanced computer
forensic tools used by businesses and governments to audit their
systems. Talk #1 is based his paper for the Usability, Psychology &
Security workshop on April 15, 2008 in San Francisco.
_________________________________________