Year: 2006
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DMCA Exemptions Granted
Last Wednesday afternoon the U.S. Copyright Office released its list of DMCA exemptions for the next three years. The timing is interesting: releasing news in the afternoon of the day before Thanksgiving is a near-optimal strategy if you want that news to escape notice and coverage in the U.S. The purpose of these exemptions are…
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Will It Copy?
In the spirit of the cult “Will It Blend?” videos, today’s question on Freedom to Tinker is “Will It Copy?” As we saw with the CopyBot in Second Life, when something becomes easily copyable, the economics of its production change: users benefit more from already-existing objects, but the incentive to make new objects decreases. This…
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CopyBot Roils SecondLife Economy
Here’s one from the It-Was-Only-a-Matter-of-Time file. Somebody in SecondLife, a popular multiplayer virtual world, created a gadget called the CopyBot, which can make a perfect copy of any object in the SecondLife world. (Here’s a Reuters story.) This raises some interesting technical issues, but I want to focus today on how it effects SecondLife’s economy.…
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New Congress, Same Old Issues
With control of the House and Senate about to switch parties, everybody is wondering how the new management will affect their pet policy issues. Cameron Wilson has a nice forecast for tech policy issues such as competitiveness, globalization, privacy, DRM, and e-voting. Most of these don’t break down as partisan issues – differences are larger…
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Microsoft to Pay Per-Processor License on Zune
Last week Universal Music Group (UMG), one of the major record companies, announced a deal with Microsoft, under which UMG would receive a royalty for every Zune music player Microsoft sells. (Zune is Microsoft’s new iPod competitor.) This may be a first. Apple doesn’t pay a per-iPod fee to record companies; instead it pays a…
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Post-Election Review
How did e-voting technologies hold up in Tuesday’s election? It’s too early to tell for sure, but it looks as if there weren’t any major disasters. We saw the usual list of crashing, misbehaving, and non-functional machines. Some of these are just routine glitches or procedural problems. If somebody forgets to deliver power cords to…
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Unattended Voting Machines Already Showing Up
I was going about my business this morning when I was surprised to see some unattended electronic voting machines that had already been delivered to a polling place in advance of Tuesday’s election. I wasn’t looking for voting machines in this location, not knowing that it served as a polling place, but the machines were…
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Cuyahoga County Possibly Exposed Election System to Computer Virus
The Election Science Institute just released a statement revealing that the memory cards that will be used to store votes on Election Day in Cuyahoga County, Ohio were stuck into ordinary laptop computers in September. The release points to an online video shot by Cleveland-area filmmaker Jeffrey Kirkby, shows a group of election workers sitting…
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Diebold's Motherboard Flaw: Implications
Yesterday I explained the design error that led Diebold in 2005 to recall and replace the motherboards in thousands of voting machines, most of which had been used in the November 2004 election. Today I’ll talk about how the motherboard flaws might have affected the accuracy of elections. Machines with flawed boards were normally identified…
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Diebold Quietly Recalled Voting Machine Motherboards
Diebold replaced the motherboard (i.e., the main electronic component) on about 4700 of Maryland’s AccuVote-TS voting machines in 2005, according to Cameron Barr’s story in Thursday’s Washington Post. The company and state officials kept the recall quiet – even some members of the state’s Board of Elections were unaware of it until contacted by the…