CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Month: November 2009

  • Tech Policy in the SkyMall Catalog

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    These days tech policy issues seem to pop up everywhere. During a recent flight delay, I was flipping through the SkyMall Catalog (“Holiday 2009” edition), and found tech policy even there. There were lots of ads for surveillance and recording devices, some of them clearly useful for illegal purposes: the New Agent Cam HD Color…

  • Advice on stepping up to a better digital camera

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    This is a bit off from the usual Freedom to Tinker post, but with tomorrow being “Black Friday” and retailers offering some steep discounts on consumer electronics, many Tinker readers will be out there buying gear or will be offering buying advice to their friends. Over the past several months, several friends of mine have…

  • Inaccurate Copyright Enforcement: Questionable "best" practices and BitTorrent specification flaws

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    [Today we welcome my Princeton Computer Science colleague Mike Freedman. Mike’s research areas include computer systems, network software, and security. He writes a technical blog about these topics at Princeton S* Network Systems — required reading for serious systems geeks like me. — Ed Felten] In the past few weeks, Ed has been writing about…

  • Robots and the Law

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    Stanford Law School held a panel Thursday on “Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics”. I happened to be in town so I dropped by and heard an interesting discussion. Here’s the official announcement: Once relegated to factories and fiction, robots are rapidly entering the mainstream. Advances in artificial intelligence translate into ever-broadening functionality and…

  • Targeted Copyright Enforcement vs. Inaccurate Enforcement

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    Let’s continue our discussion about copyright enforcement against online infringers. I wrote last time about how targeted enforcement can deter many possible violators even if the enforcer can only punish a few violators. Clever targeting of enforcement can destroy the safety-in-numbers effect that might otherwise shelter a crowd of would-be violators. In the online copyright…

  • Targeted Copyright Enforcement: Deterring Many Users with a Few Lawsuits

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    One reason the record industry’s strategy of suing online infringers ran into trouble is that there are too many infringers to sue. If the industry can only sue a tiny fraction of infringers, then any individual infringer will know that he is very unlikely to be sued, and deterrence will fail. Or so it might…

  • New York AG Files Antitrust Suit Against Intel

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    Yesterday, New York’s state Attorney General filed what could turn out to be a major antitrust suit against Intel. The suit accuses Intel of taking illegal steps to exclude a competitor, AMD, from the market. All we have so far is the NYAG’s complaint, which tells one side of the case. Intel will have ample…

  • Election Day; More Unguarded Voting Machines

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    It’s Election Day in New Jersey. As usual, I visited several polling places in Princeton over the last few days, looking for unguarded voting machines. It’s been well demonstrated that a bad actor who can get physical access to a New Jersey voting machine can modify its behavior to steal votes, so an unguarded voting…