Month: March 2005
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Pharming
Internet spoofing attacks have been getting more and more sophisticated. The latest evil trick is “Pharming,” which relies on DNS poisoning (explanation below) to trick users about which site they are viewing. Today I’ll explain what pharming is. I’ll talk about fixes later in the week. Spoofing attacks, in general, try to get a user…
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Harvard Business School Boots 119 Applicants for "Hacking" Into Admissions Site
Harvard Business School (HBS) has rejected 119 applicants who allegedly “hacked” in to a third-party site to learn whether HBS had admitted them. An AP story, by Jay Lindsay, has the details. HBS interacts with applicants via a third-party site called ApplyYourself. Harvard had planned to notify applicants whether they had been admitted, on March…
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Cal-Induce Bill Morphs Into Filtering Mandate
A bill in the California state senate (SB 96), previously dubbed the “Cal-Induce Act,” has now morphed via amendment into a requirement that copyright and porn filters be included in many network software programs. Here’s the heart of the bill: Any person or entity that [sells, advertises, or distributes] peer-to-peer file sharing software that enables…
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Separating Search from File Transfer
Earlier this week, Grokster and StreamCast filed their main brief with the Supreme Court. The brief’s arguments are mostly predictable (but well argued). There’s an interesting observation buried in the Factual Background (on pp. 2-3): What software like respondents’ adds to [a basic file transfer] capability is, at bottom, a mechanism for efficiently finding other…
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Boosting
Congratulations to my Princeton colleague Rob Schapire on winning ACM’s prestigious Kanellakis Award (shared with Columbia’s Yoav Freund). The annual award is given for a contribution to theoretical computer science that has a significant practical impact. Schapire and Freund won this year for an idea called boosting, so named because it can take a mediocre…
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Computer Science Professors' Brief in Grokster
Today, seventeen computer science professors (including me) are filing an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the Grokster case. Here is the summary of our argument, quoted from the brief: Amici write to call to the Court’s attention several computer science issues raised by Petitioners [i.e., the movie and music companies] and amici who…