Year: 2004
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Journal of Algorithms Editorial Board Revolts
The editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms has resigned en masse, to protest what they call price-gouging by Elsevier, the company that publishes the journal. The journal’s annual subscription price had risen to $700, which is beyond the reach of many libraries, not to mention individuals. The resigning board includes very distinguished computer scientists…
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Time to Retire "Hacking"
Many confidential documents are posted mistakenly on the web, allowing strangers to find them via search engines, according to a front-page article by Yuki Noguchi in today’s Washington Post. I had thought this was common knowledge, but apparently it’s not. The most striking aspect of the article, to me at least, is that doing web…
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Why I Love Diebold
One of the challenges of blogging is finding things to write about. If you want to keep a loyal audience, you have to write regularly; and sometimes it’s hard to come up with several topics a week. Happily, whenever the well is about to run dry, I can always count on Diebold to fail a…
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Staffer In Senate File Pilfering To Resign
Senate staffer Miguel Miranda will resign in the wake of the recent scandal over unauthorized accesses to the opposition’s computer files, according to Alexander Bolton’s story in The Hill. Miranda is the highest-ranking person who has been accused publicly of involvement in the accesses made by Republican staff to the Democrats’ internal strategy memos. His…
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Can P2P Vendors Block Porn or Copyrighted Content?
P2P United, a group of P2P software vendors, sent a letter to Congress last week claiming that P2P vendors are unable to redesign their software to block the transmission of pornographic or copyrighted material. Others have claimed that such blocking is possible. As a technical matter, who is right? In this post I’ll look at…
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Googlocracy in Action
The conventional wisdom these days is that Google is becoming less useful, because people are manipulating its rankings. The storyline goes like this: Once upon a time, back in the Golden Age, nobody knew about Google, so its rankings reflected Truth. But now that Google is famous and web authors think about the Google-implications of…
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Safire: US Blew Up Soviet Pipeline with Software Trojan Horse
William Safire tells an amazing story in his column in today’s New York Times. He says that in the early 1980’s, the U.S. government hid malicious code in oil-pipeline-control software that the Soviet Union then stole and used to control a huge trans-Siberia pipeline. The malicious code manipulated the pipelines valves and other controls in…
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Tennessee Super-DMCA: It's Baaaaaaack!
The Tennessee Super-DMCA is back. Here’s the text of the latest version. Like the previous version, which died in a past legislative session, this bill looks like an attempt to broaden existing bans on unauthorized access to cable TV and phone service. The old version was much too broad. The new version is worded more…
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Can Ownership Be Owned?
Julian Dibbell, at TerraNova, points out an issued U.S. Patent that seems to cover digital property systems of the type used by many multiplayer online games: How naive must one be, in this day and age, to spend months debating the question of virtual property without once wondering whether the question itself (or at any…
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Balancing Can Be Harder Than It Looks
Reflecting on the recent argument about Howard Dean’s old smartcard speech, Larry Lessig condemns the kind of binary thinking that would divide us all into two camps, pro-privacy vs. pro-national-security. He argues that Dean’s balanced speech was (perhaps deliberately) misread by some, with the goal of putting Dean into the extreme pro-national-security/anti-privacy camp. There is…