Year: 2005
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Grokster Briefs: Toward a More Regulable Net
Many briefs were filed yesterday in Grokster, the upcoming Supreme Court case which has broad implications for technology developers. (Copies of the briefs are available from EFF.) There’s a lot to discuss in these briefs. Today I want to focus on two of the amicus briefs, one from the Solicitor General (who represents the U.S.…
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Why Hasn't TiVo Improved?
The name TiVo was once synonymous with an entire product category, Digital Video Recorders. Now the vultures are starting to circle above TiVo, according to a New York Times story by Saul Hansell. What went wrong? The answer is obvious: TiVo chose to cozy up to the TV networks rather than to its customers. When…
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Network Monitoring: Harder Than It Looks
Proposals like the Cal-INDUCE bill often assume that it’s reasonably easy to monitor network traffic to block certain kinds of data from being transmitted. In fact, there are many simple countermeasures that users can (and do, if pressed) use to avoid monitoring. As a simple example, here’s an interesting (and well known) technical trick. Suppose…
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My Morning Pick-Me-Up
First thing this morning, I’m sitting in my bathrobe, scanning my inbox, when I’m jolted awake by the headline on a TechDirt story: California Senator Wants to Throw Ed Felten in Jail I guess I’ll take the time to read that story! Kevin Murray, a California legislator, has introduced a bill that would fine, or…
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Enforceability and Steroids
Regular readers know that I am often skeptical about whether technology regulations can really be enforced. Often, a regulation that would make sense if it were (magically) enforceable, turns out to be a bad idea when coupled with a realistic enforcement strategy. A good illustrative example of this issue arises in Major League Baseball’s new…
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CBS Tries DRM to Block Criticism of Rathergate Report
Last week the panel investigating CBS’s botched reporting about President Bush’s military service released its report. The report was offered on the net in PDF format by CBS and its law firm. CBS was rightly commended for its openness in facing up to its past misbehavior and publicizing the report. Many bloggers, in commenting on…
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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…