Year: 2011
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Google+Motorola = Software Patent Indictment
Google’s announcement this morning that it had agreed to purchase Motorola Mobility for $12.5Billion sent MMI’s stock price soaring and set off another conversation about software patents and the smart-phone ecosystem. Larry Page himself emphasized the patent angle of the merger in the corporate blog post: We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple…
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A review of the FVAP UOCAVA workshop
The US Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) is the Department of Defense Agency charged with assisting military and overseas voters with all aspects of voting, including registering to vote, obtaining ballots, and returning ballots. FVAP’s interpretations of Federal law (*) says that they must perform a demonstration of electronic return of marked ballots by overseas…
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The End of Gnutella?
Almost exactly 2 years ago, I wrote an essay that examined the case of Arista Records et al v. Lime Group et al. It was presented on Freedom-to-Tinker in a series of three posts (1, 2, 3). These articles presented an analysis which showed that any open filesharing network, such as Gnutella, is vulnerable to…
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Retiring FedThread
Nearly two years ago, the Federal Register was published in a structured XML format for the first time. This was a big deal in the open government world: the Federal Register, often called the daily newspaper of our federal government, is one of our government’s most widely read publications. And while it could previously be…
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Telex and Ethan Zuckerman's "Cute Cat Theory" of Internet Censorship
A few years ago, Ethan Zuckerman gave a talk at CITP on his “cute cat theory” of internet censorship (see also NY Times article), which goes something like this: Most internet users use the internet and social media tools for harmless activities, like looking at pictures of kittens online. However, an open social media site…
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Anticensorship in the Internet's Infrastructure
I’m pleased to announce a research result that Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and I have been working on for the past 18 months: Telex, a new approach to circumventing state-level Internet censorship. Telex is markedly different from past anticensorship efforts, and we believe it has the potential to shift the balance of power…
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Yet again, why banking online .NE. voting online
One of the most common questions I get is “if I can bank online, why can’t I vote online”. A recently released (but undated) document ”Supplement to Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment” from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council addresses some of the risks of online banking. Krebs on Security has a nice writeup…
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Supreme Court Takes Important GPS Tracking Case
This morning, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal next term of United States v. Jones (formerly United States v. Maynard), a case in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals suppressed evidence of a criminal defendant’s travels around town, which the police collected using a tracking device they attached to his car. For…
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What Gets Redacted in Pacer?
In my research on privacy problems in PACER, I spent a lot of time examining PACER documents. In addition to researching the problem of “bad” redactions, I was also interested in learning about the pattern of redactions generally. To this end, my software looked for two redaction styles. One is the “black rectangle” redaction method…
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Universities in Brazil are too closed to the world, and that's bad for innovation
When Brazilian president Dilma Roussef visited China in the beginning of May, she came back with some good news (maybe too good to be entirely true). Among them, the announcement that Foxconn, the largest maker of electronic components, will invest US$12 billion to open a large industrial plant in the country. The goal is to…