CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Month: October 2004

  • Fast-Forwarding Becomes a Partisan Issue

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    Remember when I suggested that Republicans might be more prone to copyright sanity than Democrats? Perhaps I was on to something. Consider a recent Senate exchange that was caught by Jason Schultz and Frank Field. Senator John McCain (Republican from Arizona) has placed a block on two copyright-expansion bills, H.R. 2391 and H.R. 4077, because…

  • Another Broken Diebold Protocol

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    Yesterday I wrote about a terribly weak security protocol in the Diebold AccuVote-TS system (at least as it existed in 2002), as reported in a talk by Dan Wallach. That wasn’t the only broken Diebold protocol Dan discussed. Here’s another one which may be even scarier. The Diebold system allows a polling place administrator to…

  • Bad Protocol

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    Dan Wallach from Rice University was here on Monday and gave a talk on e-voting. One of the examples in his talk was interesting enough that I thought I would share it with you, both as an introductory example of how security analysts think, and as an illustration of how badly Diebold botched the design…

  • Experimental Use Exception Evaporating?

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    Doug Tygar points to a front-page article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about a lawsuit that raises troubling questions about researchers’ ability to use patented technologies for experimental purposes. Patent law, which makes it illegal to make or use a patented invention without permission of the patent owner, has an exception for experimental use. The…

  • Latest Induce Act Draft Still Buggy

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    Reportedly the Induce Act has stalled, after the breakdown of negotiations over statutory language. Ernest Miller has the last draft offered by the entertainment industry. (Notice how the entertainment industry labels its draft as the “copyright owners'” proposal. It takes some chutzpah to call your side the “copyright owners” when the largest copyright-owning industry –…

  • Business Week on Chilled Researchers

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    Heather Green at Business Week has a nice new piece, “Commentary: Are the Copyright Wars Chilling Innovation?” Despite the question mark in the title, it’s clear from the piece that innovation is being chilled, especially in the research community. The piece starts out by retelling the story of the legal smackdown threatened against my colleagues…

  • Recent Induce Act Draft

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    Reportedly, the secret negotiations to rewrite the Induce Act are ongoing. I got hold of a recent staff discussion draft of the Act. It’s labeled “10/1” but I understand that the negotiators were working from it as late as yesterday. I’ll be back later with comment. UPDATE (8 PM): This draft is narrower than previous…

  • What's the Cybersecurity Czar's Job?

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    The sudden resignation of Amit Yoran, the Department of Homeland Security’s “Cybersecurity Czar”, reportedly due to frustration at being bureaucratically marginalized, has led to calls for upgrading of the position, from the third- or fourth-level administrator billet that Yoran held, to a place of real authority in the government. If you’re going to call someone…

  • Sin in Haste, Repent at Leisure

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    Ernest Miller, continuing his stellar coverage of the Induce Act, reports that, according to PublicKnowledge: An all-star game of private sector legislative drafters will start at 10:30 [today]. There will be representatives from consumer electronics, Verizon, CDT, and others on our team and from the usual suspects on the other team. They are supposed to…