CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Year: 2003

  • Comments

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    I’m thinking about turning on the Comments feature, so that readers can react to my postings right here on the site. So far I haven’t allowed comments, because I prefer to get reader input by email; and I’m happy (at least in theory) to write followup posts that incorporate and react to reader comments. Lately,…

  • Trade Secrets and Free Speech

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    Yesterday the California Supreme Court issued its ruling in DVDCCA v. Bunner, a case pitting trade secrets against freedom of speech. The court ruled that an injunction against disclosure of a trade secret is valid, even though it restricts some speech. The case relates to CSS, the encryption scheme used to scramble the data on…

  • It's Ten O'Clock. Do You Know What Your Computer is Doing?

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    Last week saw a scary story about a British man who was acquitted of the charge of possessing child pr0n. [Deliberate misspelling to keep dumb censorware tools from blocking this site. But some censorware programs will block this anyway. Heavy Sigh.] The illegal material was on the man’s computer, but he argued that an intruder…

  • Bizarro Compliments

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    To a technologist, law and policy debates sometimes seem to be held in a kind of bizarro world, where words and concepts lose their ordinary meanings. Some technologists never get used to the bizarro rules, but some us of do catch on eventually. One of the bizarro rules is that you should be happy when…

  • Guided Voting

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    Eugene Volokh offers an interesting post on “guided voting,” a simple idea with important implications. Voters often rely on the recommendations of others, such as political parties, interest groups, or well-informed individuals. For example, if I have a friend on the local school board and I trust her judgment about school-board matters, I might follow…

  • Email Redesign Not Helpful

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    Some have argued that we can address the spam problem by redesigning SMTP, the basic email-handling protocol used on the Net. Eric Rescorla rebuts that argument with a clear and cogent explanation of why the real problems lie elsewhere. Required reading for those who want to understand what can be done about spam. The case…

  • Revisionism

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    Seth Finkelstein points to a rather sloppy analysis by Peter Davies of the Felten v. Recording Industry lawsuit. There is enough of this sort of thing going around that I feel compelled to rebut it. [Background on the lawsuit: In 2001, recording industry organizations threatened to sue me and seven of my colleagues if we…

  • Bring on the Subpoena-Bots!

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    A few years ago I was summoned for jury duty. The summons was an old-fashioned computer-printed document spit out by an IBM mainframe computer down at the county courthouse. Procedural rules required that prospective jurors be chosen by an officer of the court, so a judge had apparently deputized the mainframe as an officer of…

  • Voting Machine Insecurity

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    Recently, researchers at John Hopkins and Rice Universities reported serious security flaws in electronic voting technology sold by Diebold. I haven’t yet had a chance to read the paper carefully, but I know all of the authors and I would be very surprised if they are wrong. Eric Rescorla discusses the paper and Diebold’s response.…

  • Conflict of Interest

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    Several readers have asked about the big project that has kept me from blogging much this summer. The “project” involved expert witness testimony in a lawsuit, Eolas Technologies and University of California v. Microsoft. I testified as an expert witness, called by the plaintiffs. (The case is ongoing.) In some alternative universe, this lawsuit and…