Computer Science

I follow a bunch of legal blogs, and one of the things they consistently complain about is the content of the bar exam. As Ilya Somin describes it, "the bar exam is primarily a test of memorization that covers huge amounts of material most lawyers won’t need." As a consequence, time and effort spent preparing for the bar exam do very little to make one a better lawyer.I'm … [Read more...] about The Software Engineer’s Bar Exam

Google recently announced they are researching the use of estimations of trustworthiness of websites to help prioritize results returned from search requests. This excites people who hope that pseudoscience and crazy conspiracy theories will get less attention, but it upsets people who are worried that the results will be biased: “I worry about this issue greatly,” said … [Read more...] about Some Speculation About the Google Truth Machine

Hillary Clinton is taking some heat for using her own private email account for her State Department email. I haven't been following the story very closely, but I have a few random thoughts:I keep hearing that she turned over 55,000 pages of email. Pages? Who measures email in pages? People who use email either talk about the number of messages, or they talk about how many … [Read more...] about Random Thoughts About Hillary Clinton’s Email

Since Edward Snowden started leaking secrets to the media, we've learned that our government has been up to all kinds of sneaky things -- surveiling our allies, getting call records from big telecom providers, retrieving information from online services about our online activity, building massive databases, keeping data about Americans for years.One of the reasons these … [Read more...] about Does the NSA Have a CA?

The NSA story is still breaking, so almost anything I write may soon be overtaken by new information, but I thought I'd address one aspect that involves an area in which I have some expertise: Although whistleblower Edward Snowden claims that major tech corporations such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook have given the NSA direct access to information on their servers, … [Read more...] about NSA Surveillance – Some Technical Speculation