Category: Uncategorized
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Broadcast Flag for Radio
JD Lasica has an important story about an FCC proposal, backed by the recording industry, to impose a broadcast-flag mandate on the design of digital radios. As JD suggests, this issue deserves much more attention than it has gotten. He also has copies of correspondence on this issue exchanged between RIAA president Cary Sherman and…
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New Email Spying Tool
A company called didtheyreadit.com has launched a new email-spying tool that is generating some controversy, and should generate more. The company claims that its product lets you invisibly track what happens to email messages you send: how many times they are read; when, where (net address and geographic location), and for how long they are…
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Penn State: No Servers in Dorms
Yesterday I attended the Educause Policy Conference in Washington, where I spoke on a panel on “Sharing Information and Controlling Content: Continuing Challenges for Higher Education.” One of the most interesting parts of the day was a brief presentation by Russ Vaught, the Associate Vice Provost for IT at Penn State. He said that Penn…
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Still More About End-User Liability
At the risk of alienating readers, here is one more post about the advisability of imposing liability on end-users for harm to third parties that results from break-ins to the end-users’ computers. I promise this is the last post on this topic, at least for this week. Rob Heverly, in a very interesting reply to…
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More on End-User Liability
My post yesterday on end-user liability for security breaches elicited some interesting responses. Several people debated the legal question of whether end-users are already liable under current law. I don’t know the answer to that question, and my post yesterday was more in the nature of a hypothetical than a statement about current law. Rob…
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Should End-Users Be Liable for Security Breaches?
Eric Rescorla reports that, in a talk at WEIS, Dan Geer predicted (or possibly advocated) that end-users will be held liable for security breaches in their machines that cause harm to others. As Eric notes, there is a good theoretical argument for this: There are two kinds of costs to not securing your computer: Internal…
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Florida Voting Machines Mis-recorded Votes
In Miami-Dade County, Florida, an internal county memo has come to light, documenting misrecording of votes by ES&S e-voting machines in a May 2003 election, according to a Matthew Haggman story in the Miami Daily Business Review. The memo, written by Orlando Suarez, head of the county’s Enterprise Technology Services Department, describes Mr. Suarez’s examination…
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Microsoft: No Security Updates for Infringers
Microsoft, reversing a previous decision, says it will not provide security updates to unlicensed users of Windows XP. Microsoft is obviously entitled to do this if it wants, since it has no obligation to provide product support to people who didn’t buy the product in the first place. A more interesting question is whether this…
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Valenti Quotes Me
In his testimony at the House DMCA-reform hearing today, Jack Valenti quoted me, in support of a point he wanted to make. The quote comes from last year’s Berkeley DRM Conference, from my response to a question asked by Prof. Pam Samuelson. Here’s the relevant section from Mr. Valenti’s testimony (emphasis in original): Keep in…
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House DMCA Reform Hearing Today
Today a congressional committee will hold a hearing on the Boucher-Doolittle bill (H.R. 107), known as the DMCRA, that would reform the DMCA. The hearing will be webcast, starting at about 10:00 AM Eastern. Look here for a witness list and link to the webcast. The DMCRA would do four main things: require labeling of…