CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Month: May 2013

  • Internet Voting Snafu at USRowing

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    USRowing, the governing body for the sport of rowing in the U.S., recently announced the discovery of likely fraud in one of its leadership elections. Further investigation into this region’s voting resulted in the determination that fraudulent ballots were cast in the Mid-Atlantic election that directly affected the outcome of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Director of…

  • Arlington v. FCC: What it Means for Net Neutrality

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    [Cross-posted on my blog, Managing Miracles] On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Arlington v. FCC. At issue was a very abstract legal question: whether the FCC has the right to interpret the scope of its own authority in cases in which congress has left the contours of their jurisdiction ambiguous. In…

  • Open-Source 3D Printing and Copyright Reform: It’s Time to Revisit Personal Use Copying

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    Last week, I attended MSU’s Fifth Annual Conference on Innovation and Communications Law, where I saw a wonderful presentation by Joshua Pearce, an engineering and material sciences professor from Michigan Tech, on “distributed open-source digital manufacturing” (a.k.a. open-source 3D printing). The hardware Joshua presented is called RepRap: RepRap takes the form of a free desktop…

  • Blocking of Google+ Hangouts Android App

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    Earlier this week, online news sites started reporting the apparent blocking of Google’s Google+ Hangout video-chat application on Android over AT&T’s cellular network [SlashGear, Time, ArsTechnica]. Several of the articles noted the relationship to an earlier controversy concerning AT&T and Apple’s FaceTime application. Our Mobile Broadband Working Group at the FCC’s Open Internet Advisory Committee…

  • CALEA II: Risks of wiretap modifications to endpoints

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    Today I joined a group of twenty computer scientists in issuing a report criticizing an FBI plan to require makers of secure communication tools to redesign their systems to make wiretapping easy. We argue that the plan would endanger the security of U.S. users and the competitiveness of U.S. companies, without making it much harder…

  • Who Owns the Future? Not the Middle Class

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    Jaron Lanier, in the latest contribution to the public conversation about how we live with technology, blames the Internet for the fall of the middle class.  Only the problem is he’s wrong. In his new book Who Owns the Future? Lanier–often described with the word visionary–argues that the information economy in general and network technologies…

  • Design is a poor guide to authorization

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    James Grimmelmann has a great post on the ambiguity of the concept of “circumvention” in the law. He writes about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) language banning “exceeding authorized access” to a system. There are, broadly speaking, two ways that a computer user could “exceed[] authorized access.” The computer’s owner could use words…

  • A Response to Jerry: Craig Should Still Dismiss

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    [Cross-posted on my blog, Managing Miracles] Jerry Brito, a sometimes contributor to this blog, has a new post on the Reason blog arguing that I and others have been too harsh on Craigslist for their recent lawsuit. As I wrote in my earlier post, Craigslist should give up the lawsuit not just because it’s unlikely…

  • Collateral Freedom in China

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    OpenITP has just released a new report—Collateral Freedom—that studies the state of censorship circumvention tool usage in China today. From the report’s overview: This report documents the experiences of 1,175 Chinese Internet users who are circumventing their country’s Internet censorship—and it carries a powerful message for developers and funders of censorship circumvention tools. We believe…