At the beginning of November the FTC named Ed Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton, its chief technology officer.

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The FTC, which is mainly staffed by lawyers, has beefed up its technological know-how in recent years by hiring computer scientists, such as Ed Felten of Princeton, who better understand the complexity of how information is passed around on the Internet.

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But in cases where researchers notify companies and offer to cooperate in order to solve security problems, a smarter approach to fixing those flaws has largely prevailed: Ed Felten, for instance, a Princeton researcher, faced legal threats in 2003 when he and colleagues exposed security vulnerabilities in Diebold voting machines.

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