Georgetown Law
Technology Review

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is an emerging and evolving area of technology, encompassing a variety of decentralized activities related to finance and financial services. This Technology Explainer provides an overview of DeFi, its underlying technology, a side-by-side comparison between DeFi and traditional finance and banking, and a brief overview of the challenges facing DeFi.

The Internet has become an indispensable part of people’s lives in the 21st century. People generate a staggering amount of data across major social media platforms, which is visualized in figure 1. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter allow billions of users to share their content freely. Not surprisingly, moderating the content and removing unwanted […]

Over the past two decades, cloud computing has transformed the technological landscape by increasing accessibility to and reducing the expense of online services. The technological underpinnings of the cloud begin with the Internet and its antecedents. Today, cloud computing affords the world distributed access to virtual assets, applications, and resources from anywhere in the world. […]

In less than a decade, ransomware has evolved from a niche form of cybercrime to a dominant attack vector that threatens governments, businesses, and individuals alike. Stories of attacks in the last few years demonstrate the crippling effects wrought by ransomware: hospitals without access to digital medical records, school districts unable to conduct distance learning, […]

In 2020, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (COVID-19) outbreak was declared a global pandemic, requiring unprecedented government intervention to contain the spread of this highly-contagious and sometimes deadly virus. One of the primary methods for containment of COVID-19 was contact tracing, whose success depends upon aggressive deployment. This technology explainer will analyze the […]

Technology has pervasively altered how people consume goods and services, creating niches for novel market actors. The entertainment and music industries have not been immune from these ongoing, dramatic changes. From the proliferation of electronic music genres like dubstep to the rapid growth of interactive virtual concerts during the COVID-19 pandemic, technology continues to rapidly […]

This Technology Explainer covers pluggable transports, an obfuscation tool that disguises a user’s network traffic to avoid certain traffic analysis and detection methods. Pluggable transports are like plugins—the term refers to their ability to “plug in” and swap out, which affords developers and users the chance to try different circumvention strategies in the same app […]

Image recognition technologies (IRTs) are tools that are capable of taking images, detecting and classifying objects within those images, and outputting some desired result based on the analysis. With computers becoming more powerful and image data availability increasing, IRTs are continually improving, enabling humans to use them for applications like optical character recognition (OCR), healthcare, […]

Telehealth is the remote delivery of health care to a patient through technology. While this concept may seem simple, it encompasses many categories of services, including remote doctor’s visits and patient counseling, the electronic transmission of treatment information, remote patient monitoring, and mobile applications designed to assist patients in their treatment. Telemedicine also includes healthcare […]

Introduction Nine out of ten Americans describe high-speed internet service as either essential or important. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, during which internet connections served as a primary means of connecting to a socially-distanced world, internet access was considered critical for individual, social, and economic advancement. More than fifteen years ago, President George W. Bush […]