Category: Uncategorized
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California Decertifies Touch-Screen Voting
Looks like I missed the significance of this story last week (by Kim Zetter at Wired News). California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified all touch-screen voting machines, not just the Diebold systems whose decertification had been recommended by the state’s voting-systems panel. Some counties may be able to get their machines recertified if they…
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Dare To Be Naive
Ernest Miller at CopyFight has an interesting response to my discussion yesterday of the Broadcast Flag. I wrote that the Flag is bad regulation, being poorly targeted at the goal of protecting TV broadcasts from Internet redistribution. Ernie replies that the Flag is actually well-targeted regulation, but for a different purpose: [Y]ou’d have to be…
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Where Does Your Government Stand on the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty?
The Union for the Public Domain is asking for help in surveying national governments about their (the governments’) positions on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty. The UPD is looking for volunteers who are willing to contact the appropriate representatives of their national government, ask the representatives a series of questions provided by the UPD, record the…
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Regulating Stopgap Security
I wrote previously about stopgap security, a scenario in which there is no feasible long-term defense against a security threat, but instead one resorts to a sequence of measures that have only short-term efficacy. Today I want to close the loop on that topic, by discussing how government might regulate fields that rely on stopgap…
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Off-the-record Conferences
In writing about the Harvard Speedbump conference, I noted that its organizers declared it to be off the record, so that statements made or positions expressed at the conference would not be attributed publicly to any particular person or organization. JD Lasica asks, quite reasonably, why this was done: “Can someone explain to me why…
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Stopgap Security
Another thing I learned at the Harvard Speedbumps conference (see here for a previous discussion) is that most people have poor intuition about how to use stopgap measures in security applications. By “stopgap measures” I mean measures that will fail in the long term, but might do some good in the short term while the…
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Extreme Branding
Yesterday I saw something so odd that I just can’t let it pass unrecorded. I was on a plane from Newark to Seattle, and I noticed that I was sitting next to Adidas Man. Nearly everything about this guy bore the Adidas brand, generally both the name and the logo. His shirt. His pants. His…
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Princeton Faculty Passes Grade Quota
Yesterday the Princeton faculty passed the proposed grade inflation resolution (discussed here), establishing a quota on A-level grades. From now on, no more than 35% of the course grades awarded by any department may be A-level grades, and no more than 55% of independent work grades may be A-level. I had to miss the meeting…
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What is a Speedbump?
One thing I learned at the Harvard Speedbumps conference is that many people agree that “speedbump DRM” is a good idea; but they seem to have very different opinions of what “speedbump DRM” means. (The conference was declared “off the record” so I can’t attribute specific opinions to specific people or organizations.) One vision of…
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How Much Information Do Princeton Grades Convey?
One of the standard arguments against grade inflation is that inflated grades convey less information about students’ performaces to employers, graduate schools, and the students themselves. In light of the grade inflation debate at Princeton, I decided to apply information theory, a branch of computer science theory, to the question of how much information is…