Month: May 2009
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iPhone Apps: Apple Picks a Little, Talks a Little
Last week Apple, in an incident destined for the textbooks, rejected an iPhone app called Eucalyptus, which lets you download and read classic public-domain books from Project Gutenberg. The rejection meant that nobody could download or use the app (without jailbreaking their phone). Apple’s rationale? Some of the books, in Apple’s view, were inappropriate. Apple’s…
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NJ Voting-machine Trial: Defense Witnesses
I’ve previously summarized my own testimony and other plaintiffs’ witnesses’ testimony in the New Jersey voting machines trial, Gusciora v. Corzine. The defendant is the State of New Jersey (Governor and Secretary of State). The defense case comprised the following witnesses: Defense witness James Clayton, the Ocean County voting machine warehouse supervisor, is a well-intentioned…
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NJ Voting-machine trial: Plaintiffs' witnesses
Both sides in the NJ voting-machines lawsuit, Gusciora v. Corzine, have finished presenting their witnesses. Briefs (in which each side presents proposed conclusions) are due June 15 (plaintiffs) and July 15 (defendants), then the Court will eventually issue a decision. In summary, the plaintiffs argue that New Jersey’s voting machines (Sequoia AVC Advantage) can’t be…
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European Antitrust Fines Against Intel: Possibly Justified
Last week the European Commission competition authorities charged Intel with anticompetitive behavior in the market for microprocessor chips, and levied a €1.06 billion ($1.45 billion) fine on the company. Some commentators attacked the ruling as ridiculous on its face. I disagree. Let me explain why the European action, though not conclusively justified at this point,…
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The future of high school yearbooks
The Dallas Morning News recently ran a piece about how kids these days aren’t interested in buying physical, printed yearbooks. (Hat tip to my high school’s journalism teacher, who linked to it from our journalism alumni Facebook group.) Why spend $60 on a dead-trees yearbook when you can get everything you need on Facebook? My…
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Sizing Up "Code" with 20/20 Hindsight
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Larry Lessig’s seminal work on Internet regulation, turns ten years old this year. To mark the occassion, the online magazine Cato Unbound (full disclosure: I’m a Cato adjunct scholar) invited Lessig and three other prominent Internet scholars to weigh in on Code’s legacy: what it got right, where it…
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A Modest Proposal: Three-Strikes for Print
Yesterday the French parliament adopted a proposal to create a “three-strikes” system that would kick people off the Internet if they are accused of copyright infringement three times. This is such a good idea that it should be applied to other media as well. Here is my modest proposal to extend three-strikes to the medium…
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Recovery Act Spending: Getting to the Bottom Line
Under most circumstances, government spending is slow and deliberate—a key fact that helps reduce the chances of waste and fraud. But the recently passed Recovery Act is a special case: spending the money quickly is understood to be essential to the success of the Act. We all know that shoppers in a hurry tend to…
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Breathalyzer Source Code Secrecy Endangers Minnesota Drunk Driving Convictions
The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled recently that defendants accused of drunk driving in the state are entitled to have their experts inspect the source code for the software in the Intoxilyzer breath-testing machines used by police to gauge the defendants’ blood alcohol levels. The defendants argued, successfully, that they were entitled to examine and challenge…
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Sunlight on NASED ITA Reports
Short version: we now have gobs of voting system ITA reports, publicly available and hosted by the NSF ACCURATE e-voting center. As I explain below, ITA’s were the Independent Testing Authority laboratories that tested voting systems for many years. Long version: Before the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) took over the testing and certification of voting…