Month: June 2006
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Does the Great Firewall Violate U.S. Law?
Clayton, Murdoch, and Watson have an interesting new paper describing technical mechanisms that the Great Firewall of China uses to block online access to content the Chinese government doesn’t like. The Great Firewall works in two parts. One part inspects data packets that cross the border between China and the rest of the world, looking…
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Long-Tail Innovation
Recently I saw a great little talk by Cory Ondrejka on the long tail of innovation. (He followed up with a blog entry.) For those not in the know, “long tail” is one of the current buzzphrases of tech punditry. The term was coined by Chris Anderson in a famous Wired article. The idea is…
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21st Century Wiretapping: Risk of Abuse
Today I’m returning, probably for the last time, to the public policy questions surrounding today’s wiretapping technology. Thus far in the series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) I have described how technology enables wiretapping based on automated recognition of certain features of a message (rather than individualized suspicion of a person), I…
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Freeing the Xbox
When Microsoft shipped its Xbox game console, Linux programmers salivated. The Xbox was a pretty nice computer, priced at $149. The Xbox had all the hardware needed to run Linux and its applications. Problem was, Microsoft had tried to lock down the Xbox hardware to prevent unauthorized programs – such as the Linux kernel –…
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How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Ah, summer, when a man’s thoughts turn to … ski jumping? On Sunday I had the chance to try ski jumping, at the Swiss national team’s training center at Einsiedeln. My companions and I – or at least the ones foolish enough to try, which of course included me – donned thick neoprene bodysuits, gloves,…
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Syndromic Surveillance: 21st Century Data Harvesting
[This article was written by a pseudonymous reader who calls him/herself Enigma Foundry. I’m publishing it here because I think other readers would find it interesting. – Ed Felten] The recent posts about 21st Century Wiretapping described a government program which captured, stored, filtered and analyzed large quantities of information, information which the government had…
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The Last Mile Bottleneck and Net Neutrality
When thinking about the performance of any computer system or network, the first question to ask is “Where is the bottleneck?” As demand grows, one part of the system reaches its capacity first, and limits performance. That’s the bottleneck. If you want to improve performance, often the only real options are to use the bottleneck…
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The Exxon Valdez of Privacy
Recently I moderated a panel discussion, at Princeton Reunions, about “Privacy and Security in the Digital Age”. When the discussion turned to public awareness of privacy and data leaks, one of the panelists said that the public knows about this issue but isn’t really mobilized, because we haven’t yet seen “the Exxon Valdez of privacy”…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: False Positives
Lately I’ve been writing about the policy issues surrounding government wiretapping programs that algorithmically analyze large amounts of communication data to identify messages to be shown to human analysts. (Past posts in the series: 1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7.) One of the most frequent arguments against such programs is that there will be…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Reconciling with the Law
When the NSA’s wiretapping program first came to light, the White House said, mysteriously, that they didn’t get warrants for all of their wiretaps because doing so would have been impractical. Some people dismissed that as empty rhetoric. But for the rest of us, it was a useful hint about how the program worked, implying…