Author: Ed Felten
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Ads
As an experiment, and in the hopes of defraying the cost of running this site, I have started sticking ads onto this site’s individual entry pages. The service uses some kind of algorithm, based on the pages’ content, to decide which ads to place on each page. Please let me know what you think.
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Swarthmore Bans Indirect Links
Ernest Miller reports that Swarthmore now is yanking the Net connections of students who linking to a page that links to a page containing the infamous Diebold memos. So Swarthmore students can’t make a two-hop link to the memos (i.e., a link to a link to the memos). Can they make a three-hop link, say…
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Swarthmore Students Re-Publish Diebold Memos
A group of Swarthmore students has published a damning series of internal memos from electronic-voting vendor Diebold. The memos appear to document cavalier treatment of security issues by Diebold, and the use of non-certified software in real elections. Diebold, claiming that the students are infringing copyright, has sent a series of DMCA takedown letters to…
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Rescorla on Airport ID Checks
Eric Rescorla, at Educated Guesswork, notes a flaw in the security process at U.S. airports – the information used to verify a passenger’s ID is not the same information used to look them up in a suspicious-persons database. Let’s say that you’re a dangerous Canadian terrorist, bearing the clearly suspicious name “Guy Lafleur”. Now, the…
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Warning Fatigue
One of the many problems facing security engineers is warning fatigue – the tendency of users who have seen too many security warnings to start ignoring the warnings altogether. Good designers think carefully about every warning they display, knowing that each added warning will dilute the warnings that were already there. Warning fatigue is a…
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Reading the Broadcast Flag Rules
With the FCC apparently about to announce Broadcast Flag rules, there has been a flurry of letters to the FCC and legislators about the harm such rules would do. The Flag is clearly a bad idea. It will raise the price of digital TV decoders; and it will retard innovation in decoder design; but it…
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Recommended Reading
Ernest Miller, who has written lots of great stuff for LawMeme, now has his very own blog at importance.typepad.com.
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SunnComm's Latest
SunnComm is now taking yet another position regarding Alex Halderman’s paper – that the paper is just “political activism masquerading as research”. (The quote comes from SunnComm president Peter Jacobs, responding to a question from Seth Finkelstein.) Jacobs had expressed the same sentiment earlier, on an investor discussion board, in this vitriolic message, which he…
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SunnComm Says It Won't Sue Halderman
SunnComm, which had previously said it planned to sue Alex Halderman for publishing a critique of SunnComm’s CD anti-copying technology, has now backed off. According to Josh Brodie’s story in today’s Daily Princetonian, SunnComm president Peter Jacobs has now said the company has changed its mind and will not sue. SunnComm is to be commended…
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SunnComm Responds
Hiawatha Bray’s story in today’s Boston Globe reports on SunnComm’s response to Alex Halderman’s dissection of SunnComm’s CD copy-protection technology. ”There’s nothing in his report that’s surprising,” said SunnComm president Bill Whitmore. ”There’s nothing in the report that I’m concerned about.” Whitmore said his company’s system is simply supposed to give honest music lovers a…