Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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Grokster Wins in Appeals Court
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that Grokster (along with other vendors of decentralized P2P systems) is not liable for the copyright infringement of its users. Today’s decision upholds a lower court decision, which had been appealed by a group of music and movie companies. The Court largely accepted Grokster’s arguments, finding that…
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Report from Crypto 2004
Here’s the summary of events from last night’s work-in-progress session at the Crypto conference. [See previous entries for backstory.] (I’ve reordered the sequence of presentations to simplify the explanation.) Antoine Joux re-announced the collision he had found in SHA-0. One of the Chinese authors (Wang, Feng, Lai, and Yu) reported a family of collisions in…
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SHA-1 Break Rumor Update
Tonight is the “rump session” at the Crypto conference, where researchers can give informal short presentations on up-to-the-minute results. Biham and Chen have a presentation scheduled, entitled “New Results on SHA-0 and SHA-1”. If there’s an SHA-1 collision announced, they’ll probably be the ones to do it. Antoine Joux will present his SHA-0 collision. Also…
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MD5 Collision Nearly Found
Following up on yesterday’s discussion about new attacks on cryptographic hashfunctions, Eric Rescorla points to a new paper from Chinese computer scientists, which claims to have found a collision in MD5. MD5 is a cousin of the SHA-1 function discussed yesterday; MD5 is believed to be the weaker of the two. The paper is odd,…
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SHA-1 Break Rumored
There’s a rumor circulating at the Crypto conference, which is being held this week in Santa Barbara, that somebody is about to announce a partial break of the SHA-1 cryptographic hashfunction. If true, this will have a big impact, as I’ll describe below. And if it’s not true, it will have helped me trick you…
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DVD Jon Strikes Again
Jon Johansen, known widely as “DVD Jon” for his work on DVD decryption utilities, has released a tool that lets anyone stream music to the Apple Airport Express. The Airport Express is a slick little gizmo that plugs into any electrical outlet, and can receive content wirelessly and output it on standard connectors to a…
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MS To Offer Crippled Windows in Asia
Microsoft plans to offer a reduced-functionality version of Windows XP to customers in a few Asian countries, according to an AP story by Alisa Tang. The “XP Starter Edition” software will lack support for high-res graphic (beyond 800×600), home networking and printer sharing, and other features. It will also be able to run at most…