Category: Uncategorized
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Wikipedia vs. Britannica Smackdown
On Friday I wrote about my spot-check of the accuracy of Wikipedia, in which I checked Wikipedia’s entries for six topics I knew well. I was generally impressed, except for one entry that went badly wrong. Adam Shostack pointed out, correctly, that I had left the job half done, and I needed to compare to…
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Wikipedia Quality Check
There’s been an interesting debate lately about the quality of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Critics say that Wikipedia can’t be trusted because any fool can edit it, and because nobody is being paid to do quality control. Advocates say that Wikipedia allows domain experts to write entries, and that quality…
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Skylink, and the Reverse Sony Rule
This week the Federal Circuit court ruled that Chamberlain, a maker of garage door openers, cannot use the DMCA to stop Skylink, a competitor, from making universal remote controls that can operate Chamberlain openers. This upholds a lower court decision. (Click here for backstory.) This is an important step in the legal system’s attempt to…
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Venezuela Voting Analysis
Avi Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and I just released a paper analyzing the reported voting data from the recent Venezuelan election. The paper is available at http://www.venezuela-referendum.com, in both English and Spanish versions. Here is the “Summary” section of (the English version of) the paper: After the August 15 referendum in Venezuela on whether or not…
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Valenti's Greatest Hits
Over at Engadget, JD Lasica interviews outgoing MPAA head Jack Valenti. In the interview, Valenti repeats several of his classic arguments. For example, here’s Valenti, in this week’s interview, on fair use: Now, fair use is not in the law. We heard this before, in Derek Slater’s 2003 interview with Valenti: What is fair use?…
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Absentee Voting No Panacea
Various groups that oppose paperless electronic voting have recommended an alternative: if you really want to be sure your vote is counted, vote absentee. Having studied e-voting, and living in a county with paperless e-voting, I sympathize with the desire for an alternative. But it should be noted that absentee voting offers iffy security as…
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NYT Chimes in on the Real/Apple Issue
Today’s New York Times contains an odd unsigned editorial commenting on the recent dispute between Real and Apple. The piece tries to take Apple’s side, but can’t really find a good reason to do so. In the end, it reaches the unsurprising conclusion that Real is trying to make money. The piece seems to misunderstand…
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Nurturing Innovation (II)
Yesterday, following Tim Wu, I wrote about the use of “innovation” as a slogan by advocates of the freedom to tinker. Today I want to probe further the rhetoric of “innovation” as used in public policy debates. True innovation occurs in both high-tech and low-tech settings, and it is practiced by everyone: large companies, small…
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Nurturing Innovation
Tim Wu, near the end of his stint as guest-blogger at Larry Lessig’s site, offered a typically thoughful entry, entitled “Who Cares About Innovation?”. The gist was that although “innovation” is the mantra of anti-regulation technologists, it may not be clear to the average person what good innovation does. Here’s a sample: Consider a question…
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Paper Trail Allows Venezuela Recount
On August 15, Venezuelans voted in a national referendum on whether to remove President Hugo Chavez. The (Chavez-run) government announced afterward that 58% had voted to keep Chavez in office. The opposition claimed fraud. The election was held on electronic voting machines. Fortunately, the machines generated a voter-verified paper trail, so that there was some…