Author: Ed Felten
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Comments on White House Cybersecurity Plan
As a computer security researcher and teacher, I was interested to see the White House’s draft cybersecurity plan. It looks to be mostly harmless, but there are a few things in it that surprised me. First, I was surprised at the strong focus on issues late in the product lifecycle. Security is an issue throughout…
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Lessig/DRM/End-To-End Debate: Resolved?
Larry Lessig and I had a brief blog-discussion last week about the meaning of the end-to-end principle(s), and how end-to-end applies to DRM. The discussion continued off-line, and we ended up in pretty close agreement. Here is my version of what we agree on: (1) End-to-end is not a single principle, but a cluster of…
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White House Cybersecurity Plan: On Life Support?
The White House’s “National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,” initially slated for release on Wednesday, has been delayed, the Washington Post reports. This comes on the heels of the removal of some of the report’s proposals, and a leak of the draft proposal. It looks like the report will end up as an eloquent expression of…
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ABC News Hires "Hackers" to Disrupt Police
ABC News reports on their own hiring of “hackers” to disrupt the Huntington Beach, CA police department. (Start reading at the “Testing the system” heading.) They tried to trick an officer into leaving his post to investigate a false “emergency.” They tried to infect the Chief’s computer with a virus. (Fortunately, neither of these attacks…
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Ernest Miller on Lessig/DRM
Great new entry in the Lessig/DRM debate, from Ernest Miller at Lawmeme. This is starting to turn from a narrow debate about Lessig’s piece into a wider discussion of how to think about DRM and Palladium. I’m eager to see this wider discussion start.
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Low-Tech DRM
Today’s New York Times reports that Epic Records has taken a decidedly low-tech approach to DRM in pre-releasing two new albums to critics: … the CD’s [are] already inside Sony Walkman players that have been glued shut. Headphones are also glued into the players, to prevent connecting the Walkman to a recording device. Needless to…
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Serious Linux Worm
New.com reports on a new worm infecting Linux/Apache servers. (A “worm” is a malicious standalone program that propagates on its own, without requiring any human action.) A new worm that attacks Linux Web servers has compromised more than 3,500 machines, creating a rogue peer-to-peer network that has been used to attack other computers with a…
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Network Centric DRM
Remember when I promised not to post anymore on Lessig’s DRM piece? I lied. I just have to respond to a comment from Lessig himself. He writes: … Felten is skeptical that copyprotection would be placed in the network. “From an engineer standpoint, that assumption looks wrong to me,” he says. But what if we…
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Etzioni: Reply to Spammers
Oren Etzioni has an op-ed in today’s New York Times about spam. His proposal: Though spammers hope to lure us with their dubious propositions (“URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSAL”), they rely on those of us who don’t want to participate to delete their messages quietly and go about our daily business. What would happen if…
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"Network-Based" Copy Protection
One more comment on Lessig’s Red Herring piece, then I’ll move on to something else. Really I will. Lessig argues that one kind of DRM is less harmful than another. He says To see the point, distinguish between DRM systems that control copying (copy-protection systems) and DRM systems that control who can do what with…