Alan Mislove studies algorithms. Recently, his research at Northeastern University, in Boston, has shown that Facebook’s software was leaking users’ phone numbers to advertisers. He has also found new ways to audit that same software for racial bias. But work like his faces challenges. Scraping data from public-facing websites often sails close to breaching their […]

Joe Mathieu sat down with WGBH Legal Analyst and Northeastern law professor Daniel Medwed to talk about these lawsuits and why suicide rates in county jails are trending higher than in state prisons. Medwed explains that county jails are holding places for people awaiting trial or serving sentences of under two and half years. For […]

“Small and medium-size businesses typically have fewer resources (e.g., money as well as knowledgeable people) to secure their IT infrastructure as well as maintain a good backup strategy,” Engin Kirda, professor of computer science at Northeastern University, told TechRepublic. “Hence, whenever a ransomware attack happens, they often end up having to pay the ransom to […]

Enzo Yaksic, who runs Northeastern University’s Atypical Homicide Research Group, said serial killers are enamored of the ability to control a community, and also hope to garner sympathies from those who might admire or commiserate with them.

“Selling the data was nominally against Facebook’s developer terms, but so many of these apps were ephemeral, and as far as we know, there was little enforcement,” Alan Mislove, a researcher at Northeastern University who has studied data broker activity on Facebook’s platform, told me. “You can absolutely still use old data in the new […]

“Successful serial murderers are determined, adaptable and cognizant of their surroundings, which allows them to learn from their mistakes, improve their abilities and implement new tactics to remain steps ahead of those searching for them,” said Enzo Yaksic, co-director of Northeastern University’s Atypical Homicide Research Group.

“These sorts of laws already exist, so people shouldn’t be so outraged ― they should be outraged that they already exist and are on the books and haven’t been reformed,” said Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University.

“Small and medium-size business typically have fewer resources (e.g., money as well as knowledgeable people) to secure their IT infrastructure as well as maintain a good backup strategy,” Engin Kirda, professor of computer science at Northeastern University, told TechRepublic. “Hence, whenever a ransomware attack happens, they often end up having to pay the ransom to […]

Social media cannot fill the gap created by the declining local news coverage, she and others involved in this type of research argued. “With Twitter … you are picking up a signal, but that signal might not be precise,” said Alessandro Vespignani, a professor at Northeastern University whose research focuses on modeling of epidemics. And […]

Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, spoke with Morning Edition Tuesday about President Trump’s “get tough” approach on combating the opioid epidemic.

“You have to proceed on the assumption that this information has been extracted from you,” Woodrow Hartzog, author of Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies, told me on the phone. “Cambridge Analytica used an information extraction technique that was well-known to technologists for years. The implications of this debacle is […]

Northeastern University economist John Kwoka documents the drop-off in U.S. merger enforcement.