Computer Science - anonymity

CS Table 4/30/19: Facebook, Big Data, and the Social Sciences

petersos — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 17:48:25 +0000

April 30 CS Table location: JRC 224B, noon.

Recently, Facebook announced that it will be partnering with the Social Science Research Network to provide anonymized Facebook data to Social Science Researchers. This week in CS table, we will discuss some related issues with big data and anonymity.

Sarah E. Igo (7 October 2018). We Are All Research Subjects Now - And Cold War-era safeguards won’t protect us. Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jon P. Daries, Justin Reich, Jim Waldo, Elise M. Young, Jonathan Whittinghill, Andrew Dean Ho, Daniel Thomas Seaton, and Isaac Chuang. 2014. Privacy, anonymity, and big data in the social sciences. Commun. ACM 57, 9 (September 2014), 56-63.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:50pm. Most CS Tables for the spring semester will meet in JRC 224B inside the Marketplace, though a small number will be in an alternate location, so watch each week for the location. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).

CS Table, Friday, February 20: Onion routing

stone — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 20:00:22 +0000

This week in CS Table, we will consider a widely used technique for using Internet services anonymously: onion routing. The leading free implementation of onion routing is Tor. The Tor Project provides a variety of software packages incorporating or building on this technique, of which the best known is the Tor browser, a Firefox derivative that uses onion routing for interactions with Web servers.

The readings are:

Tor Project. 2015. Tor: overview. https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en
Reed, M. G., and Syverson, P. F. 1999. Onion routing [abstract only]. Prepared for the 1999 Symposium on Advanced Information Processing and Analysis. http://www.onion-router.net/Publications/AIPA-1999.pdf
Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N., and Syverson, P. 2004. Tor: the second-generation onion router. Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium. http://www.onion-router.net/Publications/tor-design.pdf

Packets containing copies of these readings are available on the bench near Noyce 3821.

There is also one optional reading (on-line only):

Anderson, M. 2014. 81% of Tor users can be de-anonymized by analyzing router information, research indicates. http://thestack.com/chakravarty-tor-traffic-analysis-141114

Computer Science Table is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Fridays from 12:10 to 12:50 in the Day PDR (JRC 224A). Contact Sam Rebelsky, rebelsky@grinnell.edu, for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

CS Table/CSC 295: Onion Routing and Anonymity

davisjan — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 19:49:52 +0000

This Friday at CS Table/CSC 295, Max and Martin will be leading a discussion on onion routing and its applications to anonymity. Several readings are suggested:

Clark Boyd, WikiLeaks tech challenges 'top secret' security, Discovery News, July 27, 2010.
Paul Marks, How Wikileaks became a whistleblower's haven, New Scientist, July 2010.
David Goldschlag, Michael Reed, and Paul Syverson. Onion Routing for Anonymous and Private Internet Connections, Communications of the ACM, vol. 42, num. 2, February 1999.
Tor: overview, Who uses Tor? (torproject.com)

As usual, we'll be meeting at noon on Friday in JRC 224A. Hope to see you there!