Month: November 2003
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Diebold to Stop Suppressing Memos
Diebold has filed a court document promising not to sue people for posting the now-famous memos, and withdrawing the DMCA takedown notices it had sent previously. It’s a standard-issue lawyer’s non-surrender surrender (“Mr. Bonaparte, having demonstrated his mastery of the Waterloo battlefield, chooses to withdraw at this time”), asserting that “[u]nder well-established copyright law” Diebold…
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Taming EULAs
Most software programs, and some websites, are subject to End User License Agreements (EULAs). EULAs are long and detailed and apparently written by lawyer-bots. Almost everybody agrees to them without even reading them. A EULA is a contract, but it’s not the result of a negotiation between the vendor and the user. The vendor writes…
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California to Require Open-Source in Voting Software?
Donna Wentworth at Copyfight points to the fine print in the recent e-voting edict from California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, which says this: Any electronic verification method must have open source code in order to be certified for use in a voting system in California. Many computer scientists have argued that e-voting systems should…
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California to Require E-Voting Paper Trail
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley will announce today that as of 2006, all e-voting machines in the state must provide a voter-verifiable paper trail, according to an L.A. Times story by Allison Hoffman and Tim Reiterman. This is yet another sign that the push for sensible e-voting safeguards is gaining momentum. [Link credit: Siva…
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Princeton Ignores Strauss, Makes Sensible Decisions
The Office of Information Technology (OIT) here at Princeton has taken the unusual step of issuing a statement distancing itself from the views expressed by one of its employees, Howard Strauss, in a column in Syllabus magazine. (OIT operates the campus network and other shared computing facilities. It is not to be confused with the…
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CDT Report on Spyware
The Center for Democracy and Technology has issued a sensible and accessible paper about the spyware problem and associated policy issues. Spyware is software, installed on your computer without your consent, that gathers information about what you do on your computer. It’s shockingly common – if you are a typical active web surfer using Internet…
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Flaky Voting Technology
Opponents of unauditable e-voting technology often talk about the threat of fraud. They worry that somebody will compromise a voting machine or will corrupt the machines’ software, to steal an election. We should worry about fraud. But just as important, and more likely, is the possibility that software bugs will cause a miscount that gives…
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Linux Backdoor Attempt Thwarted
Kerneltrap.org reports that somebody tried last week to sneak a snippet of malicious code into the Linux kernel’s source code, to create a backdoor that could be exploited later to seize control of Linux machines. Fortunately, members of the software development team spotted the problem the next day and removed the offending code. The malicious…
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New Sony CD-DRM Technology Upcoming
Reuters reports that a new CD copy-protection technology from Sony debuted yesterday in Germany, on a recording by the group Naturally Seven. Does anybody know how I can get a copy of this CD? UPDATE (12:30 PM): Thanks to Joe Barillari and Scott Ananian for pointing me to amazon.de, where I ordered the CD. (At…
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Broadcast Flag Scorecard
Before the FCC issued its Broadcast Flag Order, I wrote a post on “Reading the Broadcast Flag Rules”, in which I recommended reading the eventual Order carefully since “the details can make a big difference.” I pointed to four specific choices the FCC had to make. Let’s look at how the FCC chose. For each…