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[Colloquium] How to Take Responsibility for Your Own Computing

September 2, 2011

Watch Colloquium: 

M4V file (643 MB)

  • Date: Friday, September 2, 2011 
  • Time: 12:00 pm — 12:50 pm 
  • Place: Centennial Engineering Center 1041

Jed Crandall
Assistant Professor, University of New Mexico, Department of Computer Science

It used to be that using a computer on a college campus or in other places was something you didn’t really need to think too much about. You worried about backups, antivirus, patches, and such—but most students, faculty, and staff didn’t need to worry about being singled out as targets by governments and other organizations who would like to violate our privacy. In this talk I’ll try to convince you that individual members of the University community can be singled out as targets by various organizations for different reasons, and tell you what you can do to protect yourself.

I’ll also talk some about how computer security research is changing. When the United Nations has summits about “computer security” these days, the discussions are more about content such as blog posts or videos that threaten sovereignty or challenge social norms. Worms and viruses are something that only the Western countries seem to be concerned about. Computer security researchers will still worry about computational games with well-structured rules (ARP spoofing, asymmetric crypto authentication, password entropy, etc.), but increasingly human psychology and motivations mean more on the Internet than RFCs and assembly language do. I’ll talk about the opportunities for research that this entails.

Bio: Jed Crandall is an Assistant Professor and Qforma Lecturer in the UNM Computer Science department. He and his graduate students do research in computer and network security and privacy, including Internet censorship, forensics, privacy, advanced network reconnaissance, and natural language processing.