Month: September 2004
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Bike Lock Fiasco
Kryptonite may stymie Superman, but apparently it’s not much of a barrier to bike thieves. Many press reports (e.g., Wired News, New York Times, Boston Globe) say that the supposedly super-strong Kryptonite bike locks can be opened by jamming the empty barrel of a Bic ballpoint pen into the lock and turning clockwise. Understandably, this…
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DRM and the Market
In light of yesterday’s entry on DRM and competition, and the ensuing comment thread, it’s interesting to look at last week’s action by TiVo and ReplayTV to limit their customers’ use of pay-per-view content that the customers have recorded. If customers buy access to pay-per-view content, and record that content on their TiVo or ReplayTV…
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Self-Help for Consumers
Braden Cox at Technology Liberation Front writes about a law school symposium on “The Economics of Self-Help and Self-Defense in Cyberspace”. Near the end of an interesting discussion, Cox says this: The conference ended with Dan Burk at Univ of Minnesota Law School giving a lefty analysis for how DRM will be mostly bad for…
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Security by Obscurity
Adam Shostack points to a new paper by Peter Swire, entitled “A Model for When Disclosure Helps Security”. How, Swire asks, can we reconcile the pro-disclosure “no security by obscurity” stance of crypto weenies with the pro-secrecy, “loose lips sink ships” attitude of the military? Surely both communities understand their own problems; yet they come…
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Absentee Voting Horror Stories
Absentee ballots are a common vector for election fraud, and several U.S. states have inadquate safeguards in their handling, according to a Michael story in today’s New York Times. The story recounts many examples of absentee ballot fraud, including blatant vote-buying. For in-person voting, polling-place procedures help to authenticate voters and to ensure that votes…
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Privacy and Toll Transponders
Rebecca Bolin at LawMeme discusses novel applications for the toll transponder systems that are used to collect highway and bridge tolls. These systems, such as the EZ-Pass system used in the northeastern U.S., operate by putting a tag device in each car. When a car passes through a tollbooth, a reader in the tollbooth sends…
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When Wikipedia Converges
Many readers, responding to my recent quality-check on Wikipedia, have argued that over time the entries in question will improve, so that in the long run Wikipedia will outpace conventional encyclopedias like Britannica. It seems to me that this is the most important claim made by Wikipedia boosters. If a Wikipedia entry gets enough attention,…
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Wikipedia vs. Britannica Smackdown
On Friday I wrote about my spot-check of the accuracy of Wikipedia, in which I checked Wikipedia’s entries for six topics I knew well. I was generally impressed, except for one entry that went badly wrong. Adam Shostack pointed out, correctly, that I had left the job half done, and I needed to compare to…
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Wikipedia Quality Check
There’s been an interesting debate lately about the quality of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Critics say that Wikipedia can’t be trusted because any fool can edit it, and because nobody is being paid to do quality control. Advocates say that Wikipedia allows domain experts to write entries, and that quality…
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Skylink, and the Reverse Sony Rule
This week the Federal Circuit court ruled that Chamberlain, a maker of garage door openers, cannot use the DMCA to stop Skylink, a competitor, from making universal remote controls that can operate Chamberlain openers. This upholds a lower court decision. (Click here for backstory.) This is an important step in the legal system’s attempt to…