Secure messaging platforms aren’t necessarily private. Though the messages’ contents might be encrypted, or protected from unauthorized users, the apps can still collect other private information about the platform’s users and communications. This collection of information about users’ data, known as metadata, is what sparked the historic Federal Trade Commission (FTC) penalty on Facebook in […]
The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly accelerated the digital boom. This new virtual world, though convenient, comes with issues of digital privacy and cybersecurity that the law is not yet equipped to handle. But reexamining current policies through a technical lens could provide a temporary solution. Concepts from mathematics can help scientists, lawyers, and even governments move […]
From November 10-12, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science(DIMACS) at Rutgers University held the Workshop on Co-Development of Computer Science and Law. The event focused on the future of converging computational techniques and legal principles, and the necessity of providing a computer science perspective on the legal and social issues of today. […]
DIMACS/MACS Workshop on Usable, Efficient, and Formally Verified Secure Computation March 14, 2019 – March 15, 2019 Location: Barrister’s Hall – first floor Boston University Law School 765 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, MA 02215 Groundbreaking results from the 1980s showed the surprising result that any function can be securely computed by a group of participants in […]
Julissa Milligan, a visiting professor at the BU law school, gave the Cyber Alliance an overview of the EU’s new privacy regulation: the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. I’m not going to spend this whole blog post summarizing GDPR – lots of people have already made brief summaries, and going into full detail is […]
(This post was originally written in August of 2018.) – Get a bunch of humans together to make some decisions, and some of them are bound to get it wrong. Humans are wildly different from each other, with so many different life experiences that lead up to a decision that there is almost never 100% […]
(This post was originally written in July of 2018.) This post was written by Sarah Scheffler, a second-year Ph.D. student in computer science studying applied cryptography. – There’s a fair amount of talk about Google having a monopoly, and some people (including me) have wondered why no regulatory body in the U.S. has yet stepped […]
(This post was originally written in February of 2018.) Greetings, and welcome to the first blog post inspired by Boston University’s Cyber Alliance seminar series. The authors are a second-year Ph.D. student in computer science at BU (Sarah), and a third-year law student at BU (Jacob). We’ll be making posts based on our personal musings […]
The Cyber Security, Law, and Society Alliance (or Cyber Alliance for short) has been holding discussions and presentations since the fall of 2016. We are now beginning an informal blog to accompany these discussions, with a record of some of the thoughts inspired by these meetings. Stay tuned for more of these posts!
Sponsored and hosted by the Hariri Institute for Computing and the BU Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security (RISCS), the Charles River Crypto Day brings together academics and research scientists from local universities and research labs to discuss recent advances in cryptography. The Charles River Crypto Day series, which is open to the […]