Author: Ed Felten
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Discrimination, Congestion, and Cooperation
I’ve been writing lately about the nuts and bolts of network discrimination. Today I want to continue that discussion by talking about how the Internet responds to congestion, and how network discrimination might affect that response. As usual, I’ll simplify the story a bit to spare you a lengthy dissertation on network management, but I…
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Where to Go, and What to Read
We don’t have a “real” post today, just plugs for two good things. (1) The NYU/Princeton interdisciplinary workshop on spyware will be next Thursday (evening) and Friday (day), in New York. It’s free and open to the public. Please let us know if you plan to come. (2) Students in my course on Information Technology…
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RIAA Says Future DRM Might "Threaten Critical Infrastructure and Potentially Endanger Lives"
We’re in the middle of the U.S. Copyright Office’s triennial DMCA exemption rulemaking. As you might expect, most of the filings are dry as dust, but buried in the latest submission by a coalition of big copyright owners (publishers, Authors’ Guild, BSA, MPAA, RIAA, etc.) is an utterly astonishing argument. Some background: In light of…
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Nuts and Bolts of Net Discrimination, Part 2
Today I want to continue last week’s discussion of how network discrimination might actually occur. Specifically, I want to talk about packet reordering. Recall that an Internet router is a device that receives packets of data on some number of incoming links, decides on which outgoing link each packet should be forwarded, and sends packets…
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USACM Policy Statement on DRM
I’m pleased to post here a new policy statement on DRM, issued by USACM, the U.S. public policy committee of ACM, the leading professional society for computer scientists. It’s a balanced yet strong statement of principles that can be applied to many public policy questions relating to DRM. I helped to draft it, and I…
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Nuts and Bolts of Network Discrimination
One of the reasons the network neutrality debate is so murky is that relatively few people understand the mechanics of traffic discrimination. I think that in reasoning about net neutrality it helps to understand how discrimination would actually be put into practice. That’s what I want to explain today. Don’t worry, the details aren’t very…
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Obligatory Summers Post
According to Section 4.3(c)(iii)(g) of the Code of Academic Blogging, I am required, on pain of banishment from the faculty club, to post about the departure of Lawrence Summers as Harvard president. Much e-ink has been spilled on this topic, and I for one feel no wiser for it. With some trepidation, let me offer…
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How Watermarks Fail
I wrote Wednesday about Randy Picker’s suggestion of using digital watermarks to embed users’ personal financial information into media files, to discourage users from sharing the files. Today, I want to talk more generally about watermarks and how they tend to fail. First, some background. Watermarks are subtle signals embedded in the background of media…
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Mistrust-Based DRM
Randy Picker has an interesting post on the Chicago Law Faculty blog, describing what he calls “mistrust-based DRM”. The idea is that when an online music store gives you a song, it embeds into the song a watermark that contains your credit card number, or some other information that would let a (dishonest) person spend…
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Sony CD DRM Paper Released
Today Alex and I released our paper about the Sony CD DRM episode. This is the full, extended version of the paper, with a bunch of new material that hasn’t been published or posted before. As an experiment, we posted draft sections of the paper here and asked readers for comments and feedback. The experiment…