Category Archives: Integrity
Security Review: New Weapons in the Fight Against Doping
The use of performance enhancing drugs and medical techniques is a serious problem in every sport, but no sport is as notorious for doping scandals as is professional cycling. While Olympic athletes, baseball players, and body builders are often caught … Continue reading
Security Review: Helios Online Voting
The Technology The technology being evaluated is the Helios Online Voting Booth, usable at http://www.heliosvoting.org and outlined in the 2008 Usenix Secuirty paper available at the same site. The election system does not create novel cryptographic tools or algorithms, rather … Continue reading
Cryptography towards a new kind of election?
Computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences recently deployed the first “practical, Web-based, secure, verifiable voting system.” After testing through 2008 and early 2009, the system, dubbed “Helios,” was used for the university presidential elections at … Continue reading
Security Review: UW Parking Enforcement
The parking at the University of Washington has always been a deadly game of cat and mouse between driver and parking enforcement. There are limited parking resources on campus, and parking enforcement wants to make sure that they are maximizing … Continue reading
Current Event: Air Force Engineers develop BitTorrent sniffer
Original article: http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/02/airforce-engineers-develop-bittorrent-sniffer.ars The Air Force Institute of Technology has a new method for passive BitTorrent tracking. The system attempts to read the header of BitTorrent packets, and compare the hash in the packet to a known set of bad … Continue reading
Current Event: racial profiling no more effective than random screening
In “Study: racial profiling no more effective than random screen”, ArsTechnica reports on a new study by William Press, who claims that using profiling at security checkpoints such as airports is not effective in catching threats. The ineffectiveness, according to … Continue reading
Current Event: Rigged Red Lights
Summary In Italy, public officials have been abusing their authority to make more money from the public by making reds come earlier than they are supposed to (a shorter duration yellow than legally allowed). This means that, since they use … Continue reading
Security Review: ShopAds from Adgregate Markets
In early September 2008 during the TechCrunch50 Conference, there we many companies that came forward presenting ideas on how to change the advertising business. One such company, Adgregate Markets, presented an idea they call the ShopAds widget. This widget can … Continue reading
Wikipedia Editing Could Be Made More Restrictive Due to Vandalism
According to this article, the English version of Wikipedia may be implementing a system called “flagged revisions” to the editing software, which would require that edits would have to be approved (“flagged”) by a “trusted” user (see the Wikipedia page … Continue reading
Absent student forfeits raffle
Here at the University of Washington CSE Department we often have events called Tech Talks, where guest companies come in and give a demonstration of their technologies and expertise. Last night we had a tech talk given by Palantir Technologies, a very promising-looking company that aims to transform the way people work with large data sets by making it easier to discover and visualizing trends and connections in the ever-accumulating mountains of data generated by our modern technological culture. And at the end of the evening they planned to raffle off an iPod touch. Continue reading