Category: Uncategorized
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RIAA Blowing Smoke About INDUCE Act
Today’s New York Times runs a brief story by Matt Richtel and Tom Zeller, Jr. on the growing criticism of Sen. Hatch’s INDUCE Act (now given a less bizarre name, and a new acronym, IICA). Sellers of clearly legitimate products, such as those in telecom and electronics industries, argue that the bill is too broad.…
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The Future of Filesharing
Today there’s a Senate hearing on “The Future of P2P”. On Saturday, I gave a talk with a remarkably similar title, “The Future of Filesharing,” at the ResNet 2004 conference, a gathering of about 400 people involved in running networks for residential colleges and universities. Here’s a capsule summary of my talk. (Before starting, a…
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Tech Giants Support DMCA Reform
Big tech companies, including Intel and Sun Microsystems, and ISPs, including Verizon and SBC, will announce today that they have banded together to form the “Personal Technology Freedom Coalition,” to support Rep. Rick Boucher’s DMCRA bill (HR 107) to reform the DMCA, according to a Declan McCullagh story at news.com. The Boucher bill would reform…
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Voting News
The League of Women Voters last week rescinded its support for paperless e-voting machines. The decision was driven by grassroots support among the League’s members, overriding a previous policy that was, according to rumor, decreed originally by a single member of the League’s staff. (I can’t find this story on the public part of the…
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Lame Copy Protection Doesn't Depress CD Sales Much
A CD “protected” by the SunnComm anti-copying technology is now topping the music charts. This technology, you may recall, was the subject of a paper by Alex Halderman. The technology presents absolutely no barrier to copying on some PCs; on the remaining PCs, it can be defeated by holding down the Shift key when inserting…
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Hatch to Introduce INDUCE Act
Fred von Lohmann at EFF Deep Links reports that Sen. Orrin Hatch is planning to introduce, possibly today, a bill to create a new form of indirect liability for copyright infringement. The full name of the bill is somewhat bizarre: the “Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act”. Not being a lawyer, I can’t immediately…
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FTC: Do-Not-Email List Won't Help
Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission released its recommendation to Congress regarding the proposed national Do Not Email list. They recommended against the creation of such a list at the present time, because the list would provide little or no reduction in spam, but would increase costs for legitimate emailers and might raise security risks. Congress,…
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Off the Grid?
I’ll be in a place with a possibly iffy Internet link until Monday evening. If you don’t hear from me in the next few days, I’m probably incommunicado; but please tune back in on Tuesday.
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Rubin and Rescorla on E-Voting
There are two interesting new posts on e-voting over on ATAC. In one post, Avi Rubin suggests a “hacking challenge” for e-voting technology: let experts tweak an existing e-voting system to rig it for one candidate, and then inject the tweaked system quietly into the certification pipeline and see if it passes. (All of this…
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Google Hires Ph.D.'s; Times Surprised
Yesterday’s New York Times ran a story by Randall Stross, marveling at the number of Ph.D.’s working at Google. Indeed, the story marveled about Google wanting to hire Ph.D.’s at all. Many other companies shun Ph.D.’s. Deciding whether to hire bachelors-level employees or Ph.D.’s really boils down to whether you want employees who are good…