Microsoft not offering Win 10 for RT Surfaces

Microsoft is not offering upgrades to RT Surface devices.

Mental models related work

A group at Princeton has a nice list of related work from people who are critical of the use of mental models as a research method.

Software updates research

I just published a paper entitled “Betrayed By Updates: How Negative Experiences Affect Future Security” (pdf) on the reasons people avoid software updates.

Free books on R

Excellent list of free ebooks on the R language and statistical analysis.

http://www.r-statistics.com/2009/10/free-statistics-e-books-for-download/

Certificate authority network

Researchers at Berkeley created a map of Certificate Authorities.

http://notary.icsi.berkeley.edu/trust-tree/

The EFF SSL Observatory also tracks Certificate Authorities and has a downloadable MySQL table of them.

https://www.eff.org/observatory

Also ICIS Certificate Notary system by Berkely

http://notary.icsi.berkeley.edu/

Digital Bill Of Rights

Privacy is a major point of contention between online consumers and companies. Advertising agencies track us across the web in order to build profiles about us so they can more accurately market products to us. Individual websites track us as we move our mice or scroll down the page so they can better design the sites both for content and advertisement placement. But what rights do we have in all this? Shouldn’t we be able to limit, view, or correct data stored about us?

Our Digital Rights tries to answer that question with a proposed set of rights people should have over data about them.

The digital self should be afforded equal standing as the physical self before the law and society.

Places-Players-Perils: Privacy Framework

Jim Adler writes about a new framework, or way to think about the privacy concerning practices of companies. His Places-Players-Perils framework is designed to help decide whether a company’s data practices are creepy and why we might perceive them to be so.

ACM author’s page

I now have an ACM author’s page:

http://dl.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81335498861

SOUPS 2011

I’m blogging SOUPS 2011 over on the CUPS blog.

http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/blog/?cat=20

Are we liable for what others say on Facebook?

Interesting case in which a student who was shadowing a medical employee observed some concerning behavior. She asked her family how to proceed with the problem but gave out no personally identifying details of the employee. The family members then told a friend, who told a friend, and so on, until someone posted it on Facebook. The school administration then claimed that the student had breached a code of ethics because the information had ended up on Facebook even though the student themselves did not post it. The student is now suing the school for wrongfully forcing her to withdraw from her program.