Month: November 2004
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Lycos Attacks Alleged Spammers
Lycos Europe is distributing a screen saver that launches denial of service attacks on the websites of suspected spammers, according to a Craig Morris story at Heise Online. The screen saver sends dummy requests to the servers in order to slow them down. It even displays information to the user about the current attack target.…
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Radio Passports: Bad Idea
An AP story nicely summarizes the controversy over the U.S. government’s plan to add RFID chips to U.S. passports, starting in 2005. The chips will allow the passport holder’s name, date of birth, passport issuance information, and photograph to be read by radio. Opponents claim that the information will be readable at distances up to…
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Keylogging is Not Wiretapping, Judge Says
A Federal judge in California recently dismissed wiretapping charges against a man who installed a “keylogger” device on the cable between a woman’s keyboard and her computer. I was planning to write a reaction to the decision, but Orin Kerr seems to have nailed it already. This strikes me as yet another example of a…
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EFF Names Advisory Board
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has named its first advisory board. I’m on it, along with Michael Froomkin, Paul Grewal, Jim Griffin, David Hayes, Mitch Kapor, Mark Lemley, Eben Moglen, Deirdre Mulligan, Michael Page, Michael Traynor, and Jim Tyre.
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Identification Codes on Printer Output
A Xerox engineer says that color printers from Xerox and other companies print faint information in the background of printed-out pages, to identify the model and serial number of the printer that printed the pages. According to a story, the information is represented as a set of very small yellow dots. (We already knew that…
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New Study of E-Voting Effects in Florida
Yesterday, a team of social scientists from UC Berkeley released a study of the effect of e-voting on county-by-county vote totals in Florida and Ohio in the recent election. It’s the first study to use proper social-science modeling methods to evaluate the effect of e-voting. The study found counties with e-voting tended to tilt toward…
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TiVo to Display Fast-Forward Banner Ads
TiVo has announced that it will overlay banner ads on viewers’ TV screens when they fast-forward while replaying recorded shows. Many commentators (such as Cory Doctorow) have criticized this move, though Kevin Werbach says it’s no big deal. As a TiVo user, I’m not sure what to think about this. I would be happier if…
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Online Lecture
The video of my Princeton President’s Lecture, “Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue: Technology, Politics, and the Fight to Control Digital Media” is now online. The lecture, which lasts about an hour, is a layperson’s introduction to the technology/copyright wars. I gave it on October 12. The first six minutes of the video consists entirely of introductions,…
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Copyright, Copynorms, and Plagiarism
Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting piece in the Nov. 22 New Yorker, reflecting on the discovery that Frozen, a Broadway play, included language lifted from an earlier Gladwell article. Equally interesting is the reaction of Dorothy Lewis, a New York psychologist who was the subject of Gladwell’s earlier article. One of the characters in Frozen…
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Spam Kings: Mini-Review
I just finished reading Brian McWilliams’ new book Spam Kings. It’s an entertaining read that offers an interesting, nontechnical peek at some of the personalities behind the spam wars. The book’s central figure is Davis Hawke, an amoral character responsible for most of the spam promoting male anatomical enhancement products. (The only thing that these…