Month: May 2004
-
More on End-User Liability
My post yesterday on end-user liability for security breaches elicited some interesting responses. Several people debated the legal question of whether end-users are already liable under current law. I don’t know the answer to that question, and my post yesterday was more in the nature of a hypothetical than a statement about current law. Rob…
-
Should End-Users Be Liable for Security Breaches?
Eric Rescorla reports that, in a talk at WEIS, Dan Geer predicted (or possibly advocated) that end-users will be held liable for security breaches in their machines that cause harm to others. As Eric notes, there is a good theoretical argument for this: There are two kinds of costs to not securing your computer: Internal…
-
Florida Voting Machines Mis-recorded Votes
In Miami-Dade County, Florida, an internal county memo has come to light, documenting misrecording of votes by ES&S e-voting machines in a May 2003 election, according to a Matthew Haggman story in the Miami Daily Business Review. The memo, written by Orlando Suarez, head of the county’s Enterprise Technology Services Department, describes Mr. Suarez’s examination…
-
Microsoft: No Security Updates for Infringers
Microsoft, reversing a previous decision, says it will not provide security updates to unlicensed users of Windows XP. Microsoft is obviously entitled to do this if it wants, since it has no obligation to provide product support to people who didn’t buy the product in the first place. A more interesting question is whether this…
-
Valenti Quotes Me
In his testimony at the House DMCA-reform hearing today, Jack Valenti quoted me, in support of a point he wanted to make. The quote comes from last year’s Berkeley DRM Conference, from my response to a question asked by Prof. Pam Samuelson. Here’s the relevant section from Mr. Valenti’s testimony (emphasis in original): Keep in…
-
House DMCA Reform Hearing Today
Today a congressional committee will hold a hearing on the Boucher-Doolittle bill (H.R. 107), known as the DMCRA, that would reform the DMCA. The hearing will be webcast, starting at about 10:00 AM Eastern. Look here for a witness list and link to the webcast. The DMCRA would do four main things: require labeling of…
-
DRM as Folding Chair
Frank Field offers an interesting analogy: DRM is a folding chair – specifically, it’s one of those folding chairs that people use after shoveling out the snow from a parking space that they use to claim it after they drive away. For those of you who don’t have to cope with snow, I know that…
-
Japanese P2P Author Arrested
Japanese police have arrested the author of Winny, a peer-to-peer application popular in Japan, according to a story on ABC News’s Australian site. (Reportedly, a more detailed article is available in Japanese.) Isamu Kaneko, a 33 year old Computer Engineering “guest research associate” at Tokyo University, was arrested for conspiracy to infringe copyright. If convicted,…
-
Is the U.S. Losing its Technical Edge?
The U.S. is losing its dominance in science and technology, according to William J. Broad’s article in the New York Times earlier this week. The article looked at the percentage of awards (such as Nobel Prizes in science), published papers, and issued U.S. patents that go to Americans, and found that the U.S. share had…
-
California Decertifies Touch-Screen Voting
Looks like I missed the significance of this story last week (by Kim Zetter at Wired News). California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified all touch-screen voting machines, not just the Diebold systems whose decertification had been recommended by the state’s voting-systems panel. Some counties may be able to get their machines recertified if they…