Author: Ed Felten
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Radio Revolution
Smart radios are a sleeper technology. They’re being developed right now; they’ll have a huge impact; but they’re not getting anywhere near the attention they deserve. Smart radios rely on computer processing power, rather than simple analog circuits, to extract information from the electromagnetic spectrum. This simple idea has profound implications for wireless communication, implications…
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Predictions for 2004
Happy New Year! This time of year, journalistic convention requires even micro-pundits like me to make predictions for the upcoming year. This goes for the rest of you bloggers too – let’s see your predictions! Like everybody else’s predictions, some of my predictions are obvious, some will be hilariously wrong, and all of them will…
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Spammers Concerned by CAN-SPAM?
Alan Ralsky, one of the biggest spammers, thinks the new CAN-SPAM act will hinder his spamming business, according to Saul Hansell’s story in today’s New York Times. Naturally, eventhing this guy says should be viewed skeptically, but the article is interesting nonetheless. Mr. Ralsky talks a lot about himself in the article, and a revealing…
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RIAA Subpoena Decision, and Fallout
There’s been lots of talk about the DC Circuit court’s ruling that the RIAA cannot compel ISPs to identify customers who the RIAA suspects of infringing copyrights. The court ruled on narrow grounds, saying that Congress, in the text of the DMCA, did not authorize the type of subpoena that the RIAA wants to use.…
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More E-Voting Follies
Lately it seems that we’ve seen one story after another about the carelessness of e-voting vendors, especially Diebold. Here are two. (1) Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation (who has been, in my experience, a reliable source of information) reported this: This afternoon [apparently Tuesday – EF] I attended a meeting of the California…
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Do We Want a Do-Not-Email List?
The CAN-SPAM Act, signed into law yesterday by President Bush, will take effect on January 1. The Act asks the Federal Trade Commission to study whether a national do-not-spam list, akin to the much-loved do-not-call list, should be implemented. It’s an interesting question. The crux of the problem is the danger that the do-not-spam list…
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Painters Buy White Canvases for a Reason
Wendy Seltzer (pointing to Ross Mayfield) quotes Verisign CEO Stratton Sclavos as saying, “We have to move the complexity back into the center of the network and remove it from the edge.” As even mid-level netheads know, this is the antithesis of the Internet’s design – the Internet approach is to put intelligence at the…
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Techno-Lockdown Not Likely
Steven Levy, in Newsweek, offers a dystopian vision for the future of the Internet: Picture, if you will, an information infrastructure that encourages censorship, surveillance and suppression of the creative impulse. Where anonymity is outlawed and every penny spent is accounted for. Where the powers that be can smother subversive (or economically competitive) ideas in…
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Abusable Technologies Awareness Center
That’s the name of a new group blog on cyber-security, at http://www.abusabletech.org, to which I’ll be contributing. There are nineteen contributors, including some of the most prominent researchers in the field. I’m excited to be associated with such an eminent group, and I have high hopes for ATAC. Freedom to Tinker will continue as always.…
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Devil in the Details
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about compulsory license schemes for music. I’ve said before that I’m skeptical about their practicality. One reason for my skepticism is a concern about the measurement problem, and especially about the technical details of how measurement would be done. To split up the revenue pool, compulsory license schemes…