Author: Ed Felten
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Comcast's Disappointing Defense
Last week, Comcast offered a defense in the FCC proceeding challenging the technical limitations it had placed on BitTorrent traffic in its network. (Back in October, I wrote twice about Comcast’s actions.) The key battle line is whether Comcast is just managing its network reasonably in the face of routine network congestion, as it claims,…
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Google Objects to Microhoo: Pot Calling Kettle Black?
Last week Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo at a big premium over Yahoo’s current stock price; and Google complained vehemently that Microsoft’s purchase of Yahoo would reduce competition. There’s been tons of commentary about this. Here’s mine. The first question to ask is why Microsoft made such a high offer for Yahoo. One possibility is…
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Unattended Voting Machines, As Usual
It’s election day, so tradition dictates that I publish some photos of myself with unattended voting machines. To recap: It’s well known that paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to tampering, if an attacker can get physical access to a machine before the election. Most of the vendors, and a few election officials, claim that…
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MySpace Photos Leaked; Payback for Not Fixing Flaw?
Last week an anonymous person published a file containing half a million images, many of which had been gathered from private profiles on MySpace. This may be the most serious privacy breach yet at MySpace. Kevin Poulsen’s story at Wired News implies that the leak may have been deliberate payback for MySpace failing to fix…
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New $2B Dutch Transport Card is Insecure
The new Dutch transit card system, on which $2 billion has been spent, was recently shown by researchers to be insecure. Three attacks have been announced by separate research groups. Let’s look at what went wrong and why. The system, known as OV-chipkaart, uses contactless smart cards, a technology that allows small digital cards to…
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Second Life Welcomes Bank Regulators
Linden Lab, the company that runs the popular virtual world Second Life, announced Tuesday that all in-world “banks” must now be registered with real-world banking regulators: As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such…
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Scoble/Facebook Incident: It's Not About Data Ownership
Last week Facebook canceled, and then reinstated, Robert Scoble’s account because he was using an automated script to export information about his Facebook friends to another service. The incident triggered a vigorous debate about who was in the right. Should Scoble be allowed to export this data from Facebook in the way he did? Should…
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2008 Predictions
Here are the official Freedom to Tinker predictions for 2008, based on input by Alex Halderman, David Robinson, Dan Wallach, and me. (1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly. (2) Copyright issues will still be gridlocked in Congress. (3) No patent reform…
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2007 Predictions Scorecard
As usual, we’ll start the new year by reviewing the predictions we made for the previous year. Here now, our 2007 predictions, in italics, with hindsight in ordinary type. (1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly. We predict this every year, and…
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Three Down, One to Go: Warner Music to Sell MP3s
Warner Music will sell music through Amazon’s online store without DRM (copy protection) technology, according to a New York Times story by Jeff Leeds. This is a big step for Warner, given that earlier this year Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman said that selling MP3s would be “completely without logic or merit.” The next question is…