Year: 2007
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Why CEOs and Companies Break the Law
Ben Horowitz, CEO of Opsware, offers an interesting essay on why so many bigshot CEOs seem to be in legal trouble. Why, he asks, would a rich and powerful executive risk going to prison? The easy answer, greed, is too simple because many of these guys were already tremendously rich and stood to gain little…
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Woman Registers Dog to Vote, Demonstrates Ease of Fraud
A woman in Seattle registered her dog to vote, and submitted absentee ballots in three elections on the dog’s behalf, according to an AP story. The woman, Jane Balogh, said she did this to demonstrate how easy it would be for a noncitizen to vote. She put her phone bill in her dog’s name (“Duncan…
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Inside Clouseau's Brain: Dissecting SafeMedia's Outlandish Technical Claims
I wrote in April about the over-the-top marketing claims of the “anti-piracy” company SafeMedia. (See Is SafeMedia a Parody?) The company’s marketing materials claim that its comically named product, “Clouseau,” can do what is provably impossible. Having both a professional and personal interest in how such claims come to be made, I wanted to learn…
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Email Protected by 4th Amendment, Court Says
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday, in Warshak v. U.S., that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email, so that the government needs a search warrant or similar process to access it. The Court’s decision was swayed by amicus briefs submitted by EFF and a group of law professors. When…
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Chinese Gold Farmers: Work or Fun?
Julian Dibbell had an interesting article in yesterday’s NYT, profiling several Chinese gold farmers, who make their living playing the massive multiplayer game World of Warcraft (WoW) and accumulating virtual loot that is ultimately sold for real money. If you’re not familiar with gold farming, or virtual-world economies in general, it’s a nice introduction. Even…
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All the Interested Parties? Not Quite.
Here’s a quick quiz to detect whether you’re stuck in Washington groupthink. There’s a patent reform bill under consideration in Congress. According to a blog entry by Andrew Noyes at the National Journal, a group of Republican senators sent a letter to Rep. Howard Berman, the chair of the relevant House subcommittee, asking that the…
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Staying Off the Regulatory Radar
I just returned from a tech policy conference. It was off the record so I can’t tell you about what was said. But I can tell you that it got me thinking about what happens when a tech startup appears on policymakers’ radar screens. Policymakers respond to what they see. Generally they don’t see startups,…
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Apple's File Labeling: An Effective Anticopying Tool?
Recently it was revealed that Apple’s new DRM-free iTunes tracks come with the buyer’s name encoded in their headers. Randy Picker suggested that this might be designed to deter copying – if you redistribute a file you bought, your name would be all over it. It would be easy for Apple, or a copyright owner,…
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Why So Much Attention to "What's a Website?" Judge?
One of the benefits of talking to the press is that reporters often ask thought-provoking questions. Recently Noam Cohen, a New York Times columnist, called and asked me why the Net community gets so excited when a public figure professes ignorance about the Net. It’s natural for people to chuckle at Ted “Tubes†Stevens or…
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The Slingbox Pro: Information Leakage and Variable Bitrate (VBR) Fingerprints
[Today’s guest blogger is Yoshi Kohno, a Computer Science prof at University of Washington who has done interesting work on security and privacy topics including e-voting. – Ed] If you follow technology news, you might be aware of the buzz surrounding technologies that mate the Internet with your TV. The Slingbox Pro and the Apple…