Mark A. Shiffrin and Avi Silberschatz
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Mark A. Shiffrin is a lawyer and writer in New Haven, Connecticut who has served in senior roles in federal and state government, including as Connecticut’s Commissioner of Consumer Protection and, during the administration of George H.W. Bush, as Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Education. He has been involved in numerous national and statewide political campaigns since 1980 as a policy adviser and speechwriter.

His writings on technology and policy issues have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Hartford Courant, and Industry Standard.

He can be reached at mas22@georgetown.edu.

Avi Silberschatz is the Sidney J. Weinberg Professor of Computer Science and the Chair of the Computer Science Department at Yale University. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineerings (IEEE), and a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. He received the 2002 IEEE Taylor L. Booth Education Award and the 1998 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (among others).

Professor Silberschatz is a supporter of America’s regulation of the Internet to ensure it is used in a free manner. He has written editorials dealing with this issue as well as other subjects for the national media.

Professor Silberschatz has writings have appeared in numerous ACM and IEEE publications and in other professional conferences and journals. He obtained over four dozen patents and over two dozen grants. He is a co-author of two well known textbooks -- Operating System Concepts and Database System Concepts

Blog Entries by Mark A. Shiffrin and Avi Silberschatz

ID Cards are Obsolete Technology

Posted March 16, 2010 | 10:29:09 (EST)

The notion that enhanced paper-based ID cards might solve such problems as employment of undocumented aliens, transportation vulnerability, or identity theft are based on illusions that yesterday's obsolete technology can be effectively used to solve tomorrow's problems.

The first illusion is that we can establish the identity of an individual...

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Passports are Passé

Posted March 2, 2010 | 11:33:31 (EST)

The Dubai passport row points out the dirty little secret that is being overlooked in the debate over how to secure borders and air travel -- a passport is now useless as a means of verifying the identity of the individual carrying it.

Modern passports and other symbols of identification...

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Houston, We Have a Problem: Meeting the Threat of Cyber Vulnerability

Posted February 9, 2010 | 15:40:05 (EST)

"Houston, we have a problem" was a classic American understatement. When Apollo 13 was in desperate straits, we saw technologists coming together, harnessing their ingenuity and empowered by government, to turn things around in a moment when disaster in outer space was approaching inevitability. Today, America has a problem with...

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Securenet: How to Combat Internet Attacks

Posted January 19, 2010 | 16:47:02 (EST)

The prospects of cyber warfare that will bring down vital services sound like something out of a James Bond movie, but there is no question that the vulnerabilities of the Internet are being probed by both real and potential adversaries. If we want to avoid the worst consequences of a...

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Abandoning Internet Oversight

Posted October 28, 2009 | 12:20:52 (EST)

The U.S. Department of Commerce has announced that the United States has agreed to give up oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organization that was created by the Clinton Administration 11 years ago to loosely regulate the protocols of the Internet. In closed...
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