CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Year: 2007

  • Introducing All-Request Friday

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    Adapting an idea from Tyler Cowen, I’m going to try a new feature, where on Fridays I post about topics suggested by readers. Please post your suggested topics in the comments.

  • Manipulating Reputation Systems

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    BoingBoing points to a nice pair of articles by Annalee Newitz on how people manipulate online reputation systems like eBay’s user ratings, Digg, and so on. There’s a myth floating around that such systems distill an uncannily accurate folk judgment from the votes submitted by millions of ordinary citizens. The wisdom of crowds, and all…

  • Sarasota: Could a Bug Have Lost Votes?

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    At this point, we still don’t know what caused the high undervote rate in Sarasota’s Congressional election. [Background: 1, 2.] There are two theories. The State-commissioned study released last week argues that for the theory that a badly designed ballot caused many voters to not see that race and therefore not cast a vote. Today…

  • Sarasota Voting Machines Insecure

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    The technical team commissioned by the State of Florida to study the technology used in the ill-fated Sarasota election has released its report. (Background: on the Sarasota election problems; on the study.) One revelation from the study is that the iVotronic touch-screen voting machines are terribly insecure. The machines are apparently susceptible to viruses, and…

  • Why Understanding Programs is Hard

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    Senator Sam Brownback has reportedly introduced a bill that would require the people rating videogames to play the games in their entirety before giving a rating. This reflects a misconception common among policymakers: that it’s possible to inspect a program and figure out what it’s going to do. It’s true that some programs can be…

  • AACS: Slow Start on Traitor Tracing

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    [Previous posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.] Alex wrote on Thursday about the next step in the breakdown of AACS, the encryption scheme used on next-gen DVD discs (HD-DVD and Blu-ray): last week a person named Arnezami discovered and published a processing key that apparently can be used to…

  • AACS: A Tale of Three Keys

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    [Previous posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.] This week brings further developments in the gradual meltdown of AACS (the encryption scheme used for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs). Last Sunday, a member of the Doom9 forum, writing under the pseudonym Arnezami, managed to extract a “processing key” from an HD-DVD player…

  • Is there any such thing as “enough” technological progress?

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    Yesterday, Ed considered the idea that there may be “a point of diminishing returns where more capacity doesn’t improve the user’s happiness.” It’s a provocative concept, and one that I want to probe a bit further. One observation that seems germane is that such thoughts have a pedigree. Henry L. Ellsworth, , in his 1843…

  • How Much Bandwidth is Enough?

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    It is a matter of faith among infotech experts that (1) the supply of computing and communications will increase rapidly according to Moore’s Law, and (2) the demand for that capacity will grow roughly as fast. This mutual escalation of supply and demand causes the rapid change we see in the industry. It seems to…

  • SonyBMG (Accidentally?) Giving Away MP3 of New Billy Joel Song

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    Billy Joel’s new song, “All My Life” is being released in stages. Presently it’s available for free streaming from People Magazine’s site. Later in the month it will be available for purchase only at the iTunes Music store. After that it will be released in other online stores. Or at least that was the plan…