Month: January 2005
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French Researcher Faces Criminal Charges for Criticizing Antivirus Product
Guillaume Tena, a researcher also known as Guillermito, is now being tried on criminal copyright charges, and facing jail time, in France. He wrote an article analyzing an antivirus product called Viguard, and pointing out its flaws. The article is in French, and standard online translators seem to choke on it. My French is poor…
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Patent Holding Companies
Lately we’ve seen many complaints about the proliferation of patent holding companies, which buy patents, usually from small inventors, and then try to extract royalties, by negotiation or lawsuit, from companies that (allegedly) use the patented inventions. Often this is depicted as some kind of outrage. But from a policy standpoint I don’t see a…
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Whom Should We Search at the Airport?
Here’s an interesting security design problem. Suppose you’re in charge of airport security. At security checkpoints, everybody gets a primary search. Some people get a more intensive secondary search as a result of the primary search, if they set off the metal detector or behave suspiciously during the primary search. In addition, you can choose…
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The "Pirate Pyramid"
This month’s Wired runs a high-decibel piece by Jeff Howe, on topsites and their denizens: When Frank … posted the Half-Life 2 code to Anathema, he tapped an international network of people dedicated to propagating stolen files as widely and quickly as possible. It’s all a big game and, to hear Frank and others talk…
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BSA To Ask For Expansion of ISP Liability
The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a software industry group, will ask Congress to expand the liability of ISPs for infringing traffic that goes across their networks, according to a Washington Post story by Jonathan Krim. The campaign to modify the law is part of a broader effort by the BSA to address a variety of…
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Predictions for 2005
Here is my list of twelve predictions for 2005. (1) DRM technology, especially on PCs, will be seen increasingly as a security and privacy risk to end users. (2) Vonage and other leading VoIP vendors will start to act like incumbents, welcoming regulation of their industry sector. (3) Internet Explorer will face increasing competitive pressure…
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2004 Predictions Scorecard
A year ago, I offered seven predictions for 2004. Today, as penance for sins committed in 2004, it’s my duty to exhume these predictions and compare them to reality. (1) Some public figure will be severely embarrassed by an image taken by somebody else’s picture-phone or an audio stream captured by somebody else’s pocket audio…
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Recording Industry Publishing Infected P2P Files?
The recording industry may be publishing spyware-infested copies of their songs on P2P networks, according to a PC World story by Andrew Brandt and Eric Dahl. The files are encoded in a Microsoft file format. When the user plays such a file, the user’s browser is forced to visit a URL contained in the file.…
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Clip Blog
I now have a clip blog, at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/clips. There I’ll post quick links to things that I find interesting, with little or no commentary.