Year: 2004
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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…
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Implementing EFF
Recently, the EFF issued a white paper suggesting an approach to the problems of music distribution. The proposal would let people buy a blanket license allowing unlimited access to music from any source, in exchange for a payment of about $5 per month into a fund that would be distributed among copyright owners in proportion…
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Dueling Viruses
There seems to be an active rivalry between the authors of competing computer viruses, with back-and-forth insults included in the textual comments within each virus, according to a Mike Musgrove story in today’s Washington Post. Witty repartee it’s not: “Bagle – you are a looser!!!” But one does worry about what will come next, if…
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Avi Rubin's Election Judge Experience
Avi Rubin, the John Hopkins computer science professor and leading critic of e-voting, has posted a fascinating account of his day as an election judge in Baltimore, Maryland, using the new Diebold machines. UPDATE (11:00 AM): It must be noted that the polling place where Avi worked was not typical. Everybody seemed to know in…
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Super Tuesday
Today is a major primary election in several U.S. states. In Maryland, it will be the first use of the controversial new Diebold e-voting machines that were the subject of several negative security evaluations. Unless there are very large, obvious problems today, expect stories later in the week in which e-voting advocates say there were…