Author: Ed Felten
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Congressmen Tell Universities to Stop P2P
Declan McCullagh at CNet news.com reports on a congressional committee hearing today about P2P copyright infringement at universities. Some in Congress are turning up the rhetorical heat on universities, urging them to react to copyright infringement as energetically as they react to the most serious crimes. Members of the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees…
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Berman Bill May Not Return
According to an article by Jon Healey in Friday’s Los Angeles Times, Rep. Howard Berman may not reintroduce his “peer-to-peer hacking” bill in the new Congress. The bill, you may recall, would authorize copyright owners to launch some types of targeted denial of service attacks against people who are offering infringing files via peer-to-peer systems…
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E-Voting Victory (Probably)
Santa Clara County, California, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, has decided that their new electronic voting machines must offer voter-checkable audit records. An AP story at the New York Times reports that the vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems, will add paper receipt printers to their machines to accomodate the county. This looks like a…
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Another Attempted Suppression of Security Research
Researchers at Cambridge University published information on a flaw in banks’ procedures that rogue bank employees may have been using to learn the PINs from many customers’ ATM cards. It has always been easy to forge ATM cards, so knowing the PIN allows criminals to steal money easily from customers’ accounts. Now some banks are…
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"Accidental Privacy Spills"
Don’t miss James Grimmelmann’s essay of that title over at LawMeme. The essay tells the story of how an email that journalist Laurie Garrett sent to a few friends leaked out gradually onto the Internet, and reflects on the implications of this kind of leak.
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Free Storage
Dan Gillmor’s Sunday column points out that hard-disk data storage now costs less than one dollar per gigabyte. Thanks to Moore’s law, the cost of storage is asymptotically approaching zero. It’s interesting to stop and think about what happens as storage becomes essentially free. Traditionally, storing data has been expensive, so we spent time sorting…
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Another Palladium Article
The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a disappointing article on Microsoft’s Palladium. Like many Palladium articles, this one seems to look for conflict and disagreement rather than an explanation of what is really at stake. We hear about fair use, which in my view is not the main problem posed by Palladium. And we hear…
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Too. Much. Snow.
This is one of the heaviest snows in recent memory here in Princeton. At least two feet have fallen at my house, and it’s still coming down hard. Up and down the street everybody is out shoveling. Nobody is going anywhere today; the traffic cameras on ever-busy Route One show nothing but snowplows.
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Biology Journals to Withhold Research
Sunday’s Washington Post published an AP article by Joseph B. Verrengia, detailing plans by journal editors to “Excise Material That Could Be Used by Militants to Help Make Biological Weapons.” Many prominent journals will participate, including “Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. “…
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Voting: Is Low-Tech the Way to Go?
Karl-Friedrich Lenz, in reply to my previous e-voting posting, sings the praises of old-fashioned paper ballots, citing a Glenn Reynolds column. I agree with Lenz and Reynolds about the virtues of simple paper ballots that ask the voter to draw an X in the box next to their candidate’s name. Paper ballots are easy for…