Month: March 2004
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New Survey of Spam Trends
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released results of a new survey of experiences with email spam. The report’s headline is “The CAN-SPAM Act Has Not Helped Most Email Users So Far”, and this interpretation is followed by the press articles I have seen so far. But it’s not actually supported by the…
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ATM Crashes to Windows Desktop
Yesterday, an ATM in Baker Hall at Carnegie Mellon University crashed, or had some kind of software error, and ended up displaying the Windows XP desktop. Some students started Windows Media Player on it, playing a song that comes preinstalled on Windows XP machines. Students took photos and movies of this. There’s no way to…
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Good News: Election Error Found in California
From Kim Zetter at wired.com comes the story at of the recent Napa County, California election. Napa County uses paper ballots that are marked by the voter with a pen or pencil, and counted by an optical scanner machine. Due to a miscalibrated scanner, some valid votes went uncounted, as the scanner failed to detect…
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Solum's Response on .mobile
Larry Solum, at Legal Theory Blog, responds to my .mobile post from yesterday. He also points to a recently published paper he co-authored with Karl Mannheim. The paper looks really interesting. Solum’s argument is essentially that creating .mobile would be an experiment, and that the experiment won’t hurt anybody. If nobody adopts .mobile, the experiment…
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Why We Don't Need .mobile
A group of companies is proposing the creation of a new Internet top level domain called “.mobile”, with rules that require sites in .mobile to be optimized for viewing on small-display devices like mobile phones. This seems like a bad idea. A better approach is to let website authors create mobile-specific versions of their sites,…
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An Inexhaustible Supply of Bugs
Eric Rescorla recently released an interesting paper analyzing data on the discovery of security bugs in popular products. I have some minor quibbles with the paper’s main argument (and I may write more about that later) but the data analysis alone makes the paper worth reading. Briefly, what Eric did is to take data about…
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Suit Challenges Broadcast Flag
A lawsuit was filed last week, challenging the FCC’s Broadcast Flag decree. Petitioners include the American Library Association, several other library associations, the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, the EFF, and PublicKnowledge. Here is a court filing outlining the petitioners’ arguments.
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A Spoonful of Sugar
Here’s a brilliant idea. A group at Carnegie Mellon University has created The ESP Game, in which a pair of strangers, shown a photographic image, are each asked to guess the single word that the other will use to characterize the image. Get it right and you score valuable points. For an extra challenge, sometimes…
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Utah Anti-Spyware Bill
The Utah state legislature has passed an anti-spyware bill, which now awaits the governor’s signature or veto. The bill is opposed by a large coalition of infotech companies, including Amazon, AOL, AT&T, eBay, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo. The bill bans the installation of spyware on a user’s computer. The core of the bill is its…
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Senate File Pilfering Report Released
The report of a preliminary investigation into the Senate file pilfering has been released (in two parts) by Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Bill Pickle. The report mostly confirms what was reported previously: many files on the shared server were unprotected, so that anybody who knew how could get them; a clerk working for the Republican staff, under…