Month: September 2005
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Net Governance Debate Heats Up
European countries surprised the U.S. Wednesday by suggesting that an international body rather than the U.S. government should have ultimate control over certain Internet functions. According to Tom Wright’s story in the International Herald Tribune, The United States lost its only ally [at the U.N.’s World Summit on the Information Society] late Wednesday when the…
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The Pizzaright Principle
Lately, lots of bogus arguments for copyright expansion have been floating around. A handy detector for bogus arguments is the Pizzaright Principle. Pizzaright – the exclusive right to sell pizza – is a new kind of intellectual property right. Pizzaright law, if adopted, would make it illegal to make or serve a pizza without a…
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Secure Flight: Shifting Goals, Vague Plan
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) released Friday a previously confidential report by the Secure Flight Working Group (SFWG), an independent expert committee on which I served. The committee’s charter was to study the privacy implications of the Secure Flight program. The final report is critical of TSA’s management of Secure Flight. (Besides me, the committee…
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Google Print, Damages and Incentives
There’s been lots of discussion online of this week’s lawsuit filed against Google by a group of authors, over the Google Print project. Google Print is scanning in books from four large libraries, indexing the books’ contents, and letting people do Google-style searches on the books’ contents. Search results show short snippets from the books,…
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Who Is An ISP?
There’s talk in Washington about a major new telecommunications bill, to update the Telecom Act of 1996. A discussion draft of the bill is floating around. The bill defines three types of services: Internet service (called “Broadband Internet Transmission Service” or BITS for short); VoIP; and broadband television. It lays down specific regulations for each…
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Movie Studios Form DRM Lab
Hollywood argues – or at least strongly implies – that technology companies could stop copyright infringement if they wanted to, but have chosen not to do so. I have often wondered whether Hollywood really believes this, or whether the claim is just a ploy to gain political advantage. Such a ploy might be very effective…
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P2P Still Growing; Traffic Shifts to eDonkey
CacheLogic has released a new report presentation on peer-to-peer traffic trends, based on measurement of networks worldwide. (The interesting part starts at slide 5.) P2P traffic continued to grow in 2005. As expected, there was no dropoff after the Grokster decision. Traffic continues to shift away from the FastTrack network (used by Kazaa and others),…
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Secrecy in Science
There’s an interesting dispute between astronomers about who deserves credit for discovering a solar system object called 2003EL61. Its existence was first announced by Spanish astronomers, but another team in the U.S. believes that the Spaniards may have learned about the object due to an information leak from the U.S. team. The U.S. team’s account…
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RIAA, MPAA Join Internet2 Consortium
RIAA and MPAA, trade associations that include the major U.S. record and movie companies, joined the Internet2 consortium on Friday, according to a joint press release. I’ve heard some alarm about this, suggesting that this will allow the AAs to control how the next generation Internet is built. But once we strip away the hype,…
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Acoustic Snooping on Typed Information
Li Zhuang, Feng Zhou, and Doug Tygar have an interesting new paper showing that if you have an audio recording of somebody typing on an ordinary computer keyboard for fifteen minutes or so, you can figure out everything they typed. The idea is that different keys tend to make slightly different sounds, and although you…