Year: 2002
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Etzioni: Reply to Spammers
Oren Etzioni has an op-ed in today’s New York Times about spam. His proposal: Though spammers hope to lure us with their dubious propositions (“URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSAL”), they rely on those of us who don’t want to participate to delete their messages quietly and go about our daily business. What would happen if…
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"Network-Based" Copy Protection
One more comment on Lessig’s Red Herring piece, then I’ll move on to something else. Really I will. Lessig argues that one kind of DRM is less harmful than another. He says To see the point, distinguish between DRM systems that control copying (copy-protection systems) and DRM systems that control who can do what with…
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Lessig/DRM/Palladium Summary, at Copyfight
Donna Wentworth offers a pithy summary of the commentary on Lessig’s DRM piece, over at Copyfight.
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Rebecca Mercuri on the Florida Voting Fiasco
Rebecca Mercuri writes, in the RISKS Forum: Well, Florida’s done it again. Tuesday’s Florida primary election marked its first large-scale roll-out of tens of thousands of brand-new voting machines that were promised to resolve the problems of the 2000 Presidential election. Instead, from the very moment the polls were supposed to open, problems emerged throughout…
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Lessig, DRM, and Palladium
As I noted yesterday, Lessig’s Red Herring piece on Palladium has generated a lot of interesting talk among techno-law-bloggers. (See e.g. Copyfight, Ernie the Attorney, Lessig, and Frank Field.) This is all interesting, but it’s very speculative. As Bruce Schneier points out, in the best technical perspective on Palladium I’ve seen, we really know very…
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Lessig on Microsoft and DRM
Larry Lessig has a provocative piece in Red Herring on Microsoft’s plans regarding DRM and Palladium. Lessig says that Palladium is not as bad as some people say, and that Palladium may in fact benefit consumers (at least compared to the alternatives). This piece has provoked some really interesting discussion over on Copyfight, Ernie the…
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China Stops Blocking Google
AP reports that China is no longer blocking Google. (Ben Edelman’s site at Harvard confirms this.)
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Reed: LaGrande Another 432?
David Reed has an interesting perspective on Intel’s LaGrande proposal. Reed likens LaGrande to the Intel 432 processor. Few non-techies have heard of the 432, but in the processor-design community the 432 is a legendary failure. As Reed says, the 432 was “Intel’s attempt to create an ‘object oriented’ processor that would embed all the…
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Intel to Offer "Security" Features in Future Microprocessors
Intel is reportedly planning to include security technologies, code-named “LaGrande,” in a future processor chip. I haven’t seen much in the way of technical detail. The article referenced above says: Where Internet security technologies already protect information in transit between a user’s PC and Web sites, LaGrande and Palladium attempt to safeguard information and software…
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Classic Security Paper, with New Commentary
If you’re interested in computer security, check out the new paper by Paul Karger and Roger Schell. Thirty years ago, Karger and Schell wrote a classic paper reviewing the security of the Multics operating system, which was then the state of the art in secure OS design. Their new paper looks back on the original…