Month: March 2004
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Remixing Politics
Somebody over at the Bush-Cheney campaign had better figure out this Internet thingy pretty soon, or it’s going to be a long, unpleasant online campaign for them. The first evidence of the campaign’s Net-cluelessness was the Bush-Cheney poster generator that came to be called “The Sloganator”. This was a web tool, on the campaign’s site,…
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Study: Filesharing Doesn't Affect Record Sales
Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf, of Harvard and the University of North Carolina, respectively, have published an interesting study on the effect of file sharing on record sales. They looked at album sales, actual download traffic for individual songs, and several other variables. Their main conclusion that file sharing had little or no effect on…
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Improving the PIRATE Act
Senators Orrin Hatch and Patrick Leahy have introduced a new bill, the PIRATE Act, that would authorize the U.S. government to bring civil lawsuits against copyright infringers, and would create a $2 million fund to pay for such suits. (Copyfight has the details.) Rather than doing this, it would be more efficient simply to give…
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Witty Worm Analysis
Peter Harsha at CRA points to an interesting analysis, by Colleen Shannon and David Moore of CAIDA, of the recent Witty worm.
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Light Weight
Derek Slater discusses Fraunhofer’s new Light Weight DRM system. Derek is skeptical but states his opinion cautiously, not being a technologist. In any case, Derek gets it right. It’s hard to see much that’s new in this proposal. If we ignore the newly coined LWDRM buzzword and the accompanying marketing spin, we’re left with a…
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Utah Anti-Spyware Bill Becomes Law
Ben Edelman reports that Utah’s governor signed HB323 into law yesterday. That’s the anti-spyware law I discussed two weeks ago. I guess we’ll find out whether the bill’s opponents were right about its supposed burden on legitimate software businesses.
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Used Hard Disks Packed with Confidential Information
Simson Garfinkel has an eye-opening piece in CSO magazine about the contents of used hard drives. Simson bought a pile of used hard drives and systematically examined them to see what could be recovered from them. I took the drives home and started my own forensic analysis. Several of the drives had source code from…
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Lawyers, Lawyers Everywhere
Frank Field points to an upcoming symposium at Seton Hall on “Peer to Peer at the Crossroads: New Developments and New Directions for the Law and Business of Peer-to-Peer Networking”. Here’s a summary from the symposium announcement: This Symposium will review recent developments in the law and business of peer-to-peer networks, with a view to…
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Security Attacks on Security Software
A new computer worm infects PCs by attacking security software, according to a Brian Krebs story in Saturday’s Washington Post. The worm exploits flaws in two personal firewall products, made by Black Ice and Real Secure Internet. Just to be clear: the firewalls’ flaw is not that they fail to stop the worm, but that…
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Gleick on the Naming Conundrum
James Gleick has an interesting piece in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine, on the problems associated with naming online. If you’re already immersed in the ICANN/DNS/UDRP acronym complex, you won’t learn much; but if you’re not a naming wonk, you’ll find the piece a very nice introduction to the naming wars.