Month: July 2011

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing is reporting on Franzi Roesner’s latest project, ShareMeNot. Cory writes: “[ShareMeNot is] a Firefox Add-On that defangs social media buttons like the Facebook ‘Like’ button (and others) so that they don’t transmit any information about your browsing habits to these services until (and unless) you click on them. That means that merely visiting a page with a Like or a Tweet or a +1 button (like this one) doesn’t generate a data-trail for the companies that operate those services, but you still get the benefit of the buttons, that is, if you click them, they still work. Smart.” Also involved are UW CSE faculty members Yoshi Kohno and David Wetherall.

Each year, UW Computer Science and Engineering and Microsoft Research host a Summer Research Institute in Computer Science, bringing together dozens of the world’s top researchers for several days to discuss an important emerging topic.

This year’s UW-MSR Summer Research Institute is taking place July 24-27 at Suncadia Resort, located in the Cascades, ninety minutes southeast of Seattle. The topic is “Security and Privacy for a Consumer, Cloud World.” The goal is to identify new directions for consumer and cloud computing, discuss the challenges for protecting security and privacy in a consumer and cloud computing world, and explore directions for mitigating those challenges. The Institute brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse but relevant areas such as computer security, cryptography, mobile systems, cloud computing, systems and networking, and HCI. The organizers are Yoshi Kohno (UW CSE), David Molnar (MSR), and Helen Wang (MSR).

This is the fifteenth UW-MSR Summer Research Institute. Learn more about this year’s UW-MSR Summer Research Institute here.