Posts

My paper Disabling GPS is Not Enough: Cellular location leaks over the Internet, written in collaboration with Hamed Soroush, Keen Sung, Erik Learned-Miller, and Brian Levine, has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.

This week’s Boston Globe Magazine has a story on innovations developed at UMass. Among mentions of the “hockey stick” global temperature graph, an electricity generating microbe and Craisins, our work here at the Center for Forensics gets a mention.

While reviewing for PETS this year, a thought struck me. Many privacy-enhancing technologies are, from some perspective, security vulnerabilities. In the U.S., we have very little in the way of legal protection when it comes to personal information, and privacy-enhancing technologies can be used by savvy users to protect themselves.

My paper Measurement and Analysis of Child Pornography Trafficking on P2P Networks, written in collaboration with other members of the Center for Forensics, has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference.

I have a small web application I wrote a while back, using the Noir framework. As pointed out on the clj-noir group by Anthony Grimes, Noir’s maintainer, Noir is now deprecated.

Last night I was fooling around with ClojureScript, running through examples floating around on the web. I thought Chris Granger’s post on Overtone and ClojureScript looked neat, so I pulled the project from GitHub and tried to lein run it.

This week’s New York Times Magazine’s cover story “The Price of a Stolen Childhood,” by Emily Bazelon, describes aspects of the trafficking of child sexual abuse imagery on the Internet, and its terrible consequences for victims.

Need a quick diagram for the paper you’re working on? Instead of this: \begin{figure} \vspace{0.5in} Remember to put a diagram here! \vspace{0.5in} \caption{The to-be-written awesome caption will go here.} \label{fig:now-its-all-clear} \end{figure} what if you could quickly turn a whiteboard sketch into a diagram suitable for use as a draft — and maybe even for use in a camera-ready, depending upon your drawing skills — in your paper?

I’ve received several phone calls in the last hour about “breaking news related to a chemist at the Amherst state crime lab facing criminal charges.” The Commonwealth Center for Forensics is not a state crime lab.

There are many minor utilities that make my life easier when I’m preparing manuscripts in LaTeX. Among them: latexpand is a Perl script that can perform various pre-submission tasks. I frequently use it to expand \input and \include directives, and to remove comments.