Author: Ed Felten
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Reading Code in 2005
[This post is part of the Book Club reading Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Please use the comments area below to discuss the Preface and Chapter 1. For next Friday, we’ll read Chapter 2.] “Code is law.” Lawrence Lessig’s dictum pervades our thinking about Internet policy. Sometimes it’s hard, reading Code in…
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Analysis of Fancy E-Voting Protocols
Karlof, Sastry, and Wagner have an interesting new paper looking at fancy voting protocols designed by Neff and Chaum, and finding that they’re not yet ready for use. The protocols try to use advanced cryptography to make electronic voting secure. The Neff scheme (I’ll ignore the Chaum scheme, for brevity) produces three outputs: a paper…
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CDT Closes Eyes, Wishes for Good DRM
The Center for Democracy and Technology just released a new copyright policy paper. Derek Slater notes, astutely, that it tries at all costs to take the middle ground. It’s interesting to see what CDT sees as the middle ground. Ernest Miller gives the paper a harsh review. I think Ernie is too harsh in some…
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Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Decision Architectures
Tim Wu has an interesting new draft paper on how public policy in areas like intellectual property affects which innovations are pursued. It’s often hard to tell in advance which innovations will succeed. Organizational economists distinguish centralized decision structures, in which one party decides whether to proceed with a proposed innovation, from decentralized structures, in…
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MacIntel: It's Not About DRM
The big tech news today is that Apple will start using Intel microprocessors (the same brand used in PCs) in its Macintosh computers, starting next year. Some have speculated that this might be motivated by DRM. The theory is that Apple wants the anticopying features that will be built into the hardware of future Intel…
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Book Club: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
[Index of all book club postings] [RSS feed (book club postings)] [RSS feed (book club comments, but not postings)] Freedom to Tinker is hosting an online book club discussion of Lawrence Lessig’s book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig has created a wiki (an online collaborative space) with the text of the book, and…
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Virtually Unprotected
Today’s New York Times has a strongly worded editorial saying the U.S. is vulnerable to a devastating cyberattack, and national action is required. We are indeed vulnerable to cyberattack, but this may not be our most serious unaddressed vulnerability. Is the threat of cyberattack more serious than, say, the threat of a physical attack on…
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Book Club
I’m thinking about running a Freedom to Tinker book club. I would choose a book and invite readers to read it along with me, one chapter per week. I would post a reaction to each chapter (or I would ask another reader to do so), and a discussion would follow in the comments section. This…
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Dissecting the Witty Worm
A clever new paper by Abhishek Kumar, Vern Paxson, and Nick Weaver analyzes the Witty Worm, which infected computers running certain security software in March 2004. By analyzing the spray of random packets Witty sent around the Internet, they managed to learn a huge amount about Witty’s spread, including exactly where the virus was injected…
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On a New Server
This site is on the new server now, using WordPress. Please let me know, in the comments, if you see any problems.