Ken's blog

X hurts Y to send a threatening message to Z: "hey Z, don't be like Y, or you will be next."  developing the communication cha...

It's important for a society to have a healthy institution of the press, as that is one of the channels through which government finds o...

In a regime which does a lot of censorship, people will suspect censorship is happening even in situations in which it is not: They're s...

Mass surveillance seems inevitable given its decreasing cost and economies of scale.  Therefore, the best way to regulate it is to monitor ...

Although we celebrate the first to achieve a technology, what happens immediately afterward is often very exciting: the technology gets rapi...

Given an academic paper with an inline citation to another work, create a tool which fetches the other work, does NLP on both works, and ver...

There was a brief glimpse of light in the late 90s with the proliferation of P2P software such as Napster, et al., when it looked like the f...

A newspaper should publish a public key so that people can send them encrypted information safe from eavesdropping.  This complements encour...

Anonymous email through chaining remailers (mixmaster, cypherpunk, nym, etc.) seems dead, perhaps killed off by spam, which is a shame becau...

An adversarial framework seems like it should work well for discovering truth: each side challenges the other's version of the truth, ca...

Journalism is a public good, so suffers from tragedy of commons: a private business has difficulty making a profit from it (unless it resort...

An online news article can provide options to hide people's names, genders, locations, and other markers that people use to form preconc...

Nantucket Cottage Hospital is classified as the only rural hospital in Massachusetts in order to obtain significant federal Medicare benefit...

If you cite a work in an academic paper, you have a moral obligation to make sure the cited work is easily available, or make it so if not. ...

Suppose a person, a lawyer, becomes aware of a certain bias in the justice system.  They can choose to publicly disclose it, which could ben...

Superman participates in only a few missions of the Justice League.  Very slowly it is revealed why: on the remaining missions, the League i...

The complete collection of cables published as a SQL dump by Wikileaks ("Cable database in searchable format - for developers (updated!...

A diligent reporter ends up becoming the most knowledgeable expert in a subject.  This might be a problem if the reporter becomes forced to ...

Governments typically censor speech deemed inflammatory, acting within their prerogative to prevent destabilization of society.  Modify such...

The most important documents are those which help you do something: mere information transforms into actions in the real world.  Often it is...