Category: Uncategorized
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Thoughts on the Gmail Privacy Flap
I have to admit I’m surprised at the magnitude of the recent controversy about Gmail, Google’s new webmail service. Gmail is a free webmail service, giving you up to one gigabyte of storage for email. The service shows you text ads alongside your messages, and provides various search features for your mail. The service has…
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Grimmelmann on the Digital Cops Conference
James Grimmelmann reports on the recent Digital Cops conference at Yale. It’s a typically Grimmel-rific effort, both entertaining and insightful.
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Voting Machine Inspection
Yesterday, I had a chance, with some colleagues, to look over the new e-voting machines that will be used in the future here in Mercer County, New Jersey. They’re AVC Advantage machines, made by Sequoia. The machines were available for public inspection at Princeton Borough Hall. (They’re available today too, at the Suzanne Patterson Center,…
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A Grand Unified Theory of Filesharing
Recently we’ve seen several studies of the impact of filesharing on CD sales. We have enough data now to draw some (very) preliminary conclusions, assuming the studies are correct. Despite the apparent contradictions between the various studies, I think there is a plausible theory that can explain them all – a Grand Unified Theory of…
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New Study of the Net
Eric Boorstin, a senior at Princeton, just filed his senior thesis, Music Sales in the Age of File Sharing. The thesis includes a clever study of the impact of Internet usage on CD sales. This is a twist on previous studies, which have tried to correlate CD sales to usage of filesharing. The tradeoff here…
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Princeton Proposes Quotas to Control Grade Inflation
Princeton is considering putting a cap on the number of A’s that professors could award to students, as a way of fighting grade inflation. Details are in Alyson Zureick’s story in today’s Daily Princetonian. To my knowledge, Princeton would be the first major university to take such a step. The proposal would have to be…
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WIPO Considering a Ban on Computers
Ernest Miller points to a draft treaty being considered by the World Intellectual Property Organization. It’s a truly remarkable document. And I don’t mean that in a good way. Here’s the most amazing part, from Article 16, Alternative V: 2. In particular, effective legal remedies shall be provided against those who: … (iii) participate in…
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Trademarks and Ad Placement
Dana Blankenhorn at Moore’s Lore has some interesting discussion of the lawsuit between American Blinds and Google. Here’s the background: When you do a Google search, the results page gives the search results on the left side of the page, and a few ads (marked as such) on the right edge of the page. The…
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New, Unauthorized Sloganator
I wrote previously about how the remix culture will affect political discourse. A great example is the new, unauthorized version of the Bush/Cheney “Sloganator”. The original, you may recall, was on the Bush/Cheney website. It allowed you to make a campaign poster with the candidates’ names and (almost) any slogan you liked. After much hilarity…
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U.S. Drops Ban on Editing Some Foreign Papers
The New York Times reports that the U.S. government has dropped it objection to U.S. people copy-editing scientific papers whose authors come from countries that are under U.S. trade embargoes. Previously, the government had interpreted such copy-editing as a violation of the trade embargoes, an offense punishable by up to ten years in prison. Though…