Month: October 2008
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Why is printing so hard?
Recently I bought a mildly used laser printer and wanted to set it up on my home network. In a better world, this would be a trivial exercise — just connect the printer to the network and let the computers discover it. In the actual world, it was a forty-five minute project that only a…
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California Issues Emergency Election Audit Regulations
The Office of the California Secretary of State has issued a set of proposed emergency regulations for post-election manual tallying of paper election records. In this post, my first at FTT, I’ll try to explain and contextualize this development. Since her election to office, California Secretary of State (CA SoS) Debra Bowen has methodically studied…
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Counting Electronic Votes in Secret
Things are not looking good for open government when it comes to observing poll workers on Election Night. Our state election laws, written for the old lever machines, now apply to Sequoia electronic voting machines. Andrew Appel and I have been asking a straightforward question: Can ordinary members of the public watch the procedures used…
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Piracy Statistics and the Importance of Journalistic Skepticism
If you’ve paid attention to copyright debates in recent years, you’ve probably seen advocates for more restrictive copyright laws claim that “counterfeiting and piracy” cost the US economy as much as $250 billion. When pressed, those who make these kinds of claims are inevitably vague about exactly where these figures come from. For example, I…
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Lessons from the Fall of NebuAd
With three Congressional hearings held within the past four months, U.S. legislators have expressed increased concern about the handling of private online information. As Paul Ohm mentioned yesterday, the recent scrutiny has focused mainly on the ability of ISPs to intercept and analyze the online traffic of its users– in a word, surveillance. One of…
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Opting In (or Out) is Hard to Do
Thanks to Ed and his fellow bloggers for welcoming me to the blog. I’m thrilled to have this opportunity, because as a law professor who writes about software as a regulator of behavior (most often through the substantive lenses of information privacy, computer crime, and criminal procedure), I often need to vet my theories and…
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Satellite Piracy, Mod Chips, and the Freedom to Tinker
Tom Lee makes an interesting point about the satellite case I wrote about on Saturday: the problem facing EchoStar and other satellite manufacturers is strikingly similar to the challenges that have been faced for many years by video game console manufacturers. There’s a grey market in “mod chips” for video game consoles. Typically, they’re sold…
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Satellite Case Raises Questions about the Rule of Law
My friend Julian Sanchez reports on a September 29 ruling by a federal magistrate judge that retailers will not be required to disclose the names of customers who purchased open satellite hardware that is currently the subject of a copyright lawsuit. The Plaintiff, Echostar, sought the records as part of its discovery procedures in a…
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Political Information Overload and the New Filtering
[We’re pleased to introduce Luis Villa as a guest blogger. Luis is a law student at Columbia Law School, focusing on law and technology, including intellectual property, telecommunications, privacy, and e-commerce. Outside of class he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Science and Technology Law Review. Before law school, Luis did great work on open source…
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Judge Suppresses Report on Voting Machine Security
A judge of the New Jersey Superior Court has prohibited the scheduled release of a report on the security and accuracy of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. Last June, Judge Linda Feinberg ordered Sequoia Voting Systems to turn over its source code to me (serving as an expert witness, assisted by a team of…