Month: April 2007
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Miracle Fruit: Tinkering with our Taste Buds
Miraculin, the extract of a West African fruit, is said to make sour foods taste sweet. It’s not sugary, but it’s said to trick your taste buds into misreporting the flavor of the food you’re eating. One of my students, Bill Zeller, bought some miraculin and a group of us tried it out. Here, in…
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Botnet Briefing
Yesterday I spoke at a Washington briefing on botnets. The event was hosted by the Senate Science and Technology Caucus, and sponsored by ACM and Microsoft. Along with opening remarks by Senators Pryor and Bennett, there were short briefings by me, Phil Reitinger of Microsoft, and Scott O’Neal of the FBI. (Botnets are coordinated computer…
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Internet So Crowded, Nobody Goes There Anymore
Once again we’re seeing stories, like this one from Anick Jesdanun at AP, saying that the Internet is broken and needs to be redesigned. The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a “clean slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since…
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Is SafeMedia a Parody?
[UPDATE (Dec. 2011): I wrote the post below a few years ago. SafeMedia’s website and product offerings have changed since then. Please don’t interpret this post as a commentary on SafeMedia’s current products.] Peter Eckersley at EFF wrote recently about a new network-filtering company called SafeMedia that claims it can block all copyrighted material in…
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Cablevision and Anti-Efficiency Policy
I wrote recently about the Cablevision decision, in which a judge appeared to draw a line between two kinds of Digital Video Recorder (DVR) technologies. (DVRs let home viewers record TV shows and play them later.) The judge found unlawful a Remote Storage DVR (RS-DVR) in which recorded shows are captured and stored in the…
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Software HD-DVD/Blu-ray Players Updated
The central authority that runs AACS (the anticopying/DRM system used on commercial HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs) announced [April 6, 2007 item] last week the reissue of some software players that can play the discs, “[i]n response to attacks against certain PC-based applications”. The affected applications include WinDVD and probably others. Recall that analysts had previously…
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Why So Many False Positives on the No-Fly List?
Yesterday I argued that Walter Murphy’s much-discussed encounter with airport security was probably just a false positive in the no-fly list matching algorithm. Today I want to talk about why false positives (ordinary citizens triggering mistaken “matches” with the list) are so common. First, a preliminary. It’s often argued that the high false positive rate…
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Walter Murphy Stopped at Airport: Another False Positive
Blogs are buzzing about the story of Walter Murphy, a retired Princeton professor who reported having triggered a no-fly list match on a recent trip. Prof. Murphy suspects this happened because he has given speeches criticizing the Bush Administration. I studied the no-fly list mechanism (and the related watchlist) during my service on the TSA’s…
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Judge Geeks Out, Says Cablevision DVR Infringes
In a decision that has triggered much debate, a Federal judge ruled recently that Cablevision’s Digital Video Recorder system infringes the copyrights in TV programs. It’s an unusual decision that deserves some unpacking. First, some background. The case concerned Digital Video Recorder (DVR) technology, which lets cable TV customers record shows in digital storage and…
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EMI To Sell DRM-Free Music
EMI, the world’s third largest record company, announced yesterday that it will sell its music without DRM (copy protection) on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Songs will be available in two formats: the original DRMed format for the original $0.99 price, or a higher-fidelity DRM-free format for $1.29. This is a huge step forward for EMI…