Month: February 2006
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Analog Hole Bill Requires "Open and Public" Discussion of Secret Technology
Today I want to return to the Sensenbrenner-Conyers analog hole bill, which would impose a secret law – a requirement that all devices that accept analog video inputs must implement a secret technical specification for something called a VEIL detector. If you want to see this specification, you have to pay a $10,000 fee to…
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AOL, Yahoo Challenge Email Neutrality
AOL and Yahoo will soon start using Goodmail, a system that lets bulk email senders bypass the companies’ spam filters by paying the companies one-fourth of a cent per message, and promising not to send unsolicited messages, according to a New York Times story by Saul Hansell. Pay-to-send systems are one standard response to spam.…
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Report: Many Apps Misconfigure Security Settings
My fellow Princeton computer scientists Sudhakar Govindavajhala and Andrew Appel released an eye-opening report this week on access control problems in several popular applications. In the old days, operating systems had simple access control mechanisms. In Unix, each file belonged to an owner and a (single) group of users. The owner had the option to…
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Paper Naming Contest
So our Sony CD DRM paper is virtually done, except for one thing: the title. We hope you can help us out. We’re looking for a phrase from a song lyric, song title, or album title that is distinctive and can be read as a pithy comment on the whole Sony CD DRM incident. It…
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What's in the Secret VEIL Test Results?
I wrote last week about how the analog hole bill would mandate use of the secret VEIL technology. Because the law would require compliance with the VEIL specification, that spec would effectively be part of the law. Call me old-fashioned, but I think there’s something wrong when Congress is considering a secret bill that would…