Jerry Brito

By day Jerry Brito researches tech policy and teaches law at George Mason University, and by night he develops web and iOS apps. In between he finds time to write for blogs and host a weekly tech and society podcast, Surprisingly Free.

Articles from Contributor

Why Your Personal Information Wants to Be Free

You wouldn’t know it from the buzz, but the hack of Sony’s PlaysStation Network that compromised 77 million accounts is not the biggest breach in history. It’s only 4th according to DataLossDB. We’ve been losing much more data for quite a while now.

In a thoughtful blog post this week, computer scientist Ben Adida reflected on …

Veteran Hacker Hired to Keep an Eye On Every Internet Address

Jeff Moss, the hacker better known as “The Dark Tangent,” has been named Vice President and Chief Security Officer of ICANN, the non-profit corporation that manages the Internet’s names and numbering infrastructure. He is the founder of DEF CON, the world’s largest conference for hackers, as well as the Black Hat security …

Online Cash Bitcoin Could Challenge Governments, Banks

Late last year, after WikiLeaks began releasing its trove of State Department cables, many individuals sought to show solidarity with the group by making a donation. They found, however, that many payment processors would not remit money to WikiLeaks, some say as a result of U.S. government pressure. PayPal even froze the group’s …

Explaining the Google Books Case Saga

A federal court yesterday rejected a settlement between Google, authors and publishers, throwing into doubt the search company’s plans to make every book ever published searchable online.

Acknowledging in his opinion that “the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many,” federal district court judge Denny Chin …

In Defense of Targeted TV Ads

This week we learned that cable and satellite TV companies are beginning to show targeted advertisements to viewers. That is, they can beam custom-tailored commercials to individual households even if they’re tuned to the same program.

For example, a 17-year-old male watching Watson on Jeopardy! might get a commercial for the Xbox, …

ICANN vs. the World

A rose by any other name may smell just as sweet, but if that name is an Internet top-level domain name, world governments may beg to differ.

The “.com” at the end of TIME.com is known as a top-level domain—or TLD—and you may be aware of others, including .net, .org, .edu, and even .ly for Libya. While there are over a hundred …

The U.S. Wants to Create a Political Geek Squad in Egypt

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Jerry Brito, a policy wonk and web developer based in Washington, D.C.

After what some are calling a “Facebook revolution” in Egypt, you’d think that the Egyptians would have something to teach us about digital civic activism, and not the other way around. But the State Department has

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