Category: Uncategorized
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Utah Anti-Spyware Bill
The Utah state legislature has passed an anti-spyware bill, which now awaits the governor’s signature or veto. The bill is opposed by a large coalition of infotech companies, including Amazon, AOL, AT&T, eBay, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo. The bill bans the installation of spyware on a user’s computer. The core of the bill is its…
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Senate File Pilfering Report Released
The report of a preliminary investigation into the Senate file pilfering has been released (in two parts) by Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Bill Pickle. The report mostly confirms what was reported previously: many files on the shared server were unprotected, so that anybody who knew how could get them; a clerk working for the Republican staff, under…
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Implementing EFF
Recently, the EFF issued a white paper suggesting an approach to the problems of music distribution. The proposal would let people buy a blanket license allowing unlimited access to music from any source, in exchange for a payment of about $5 per month into a fund that would be distributed among copyright owners in proportion…
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Dueling Viruses
There seems to be an active rivalry between the authors of competing computer viruses, with back-and-forth insults included in the textual comments within each virus, according to a Mike Musgrove story in today’s Washington Post. Witty repartee it’s not: “Bagle – you are a looser!!!” But one does worry about what will come next, if…
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Avi Rubin's Election Judge Experience
Avi Rubin, the John Hopkins computer science professor and leading critic of e-voting, has posted a fascinating account of his day as an election judge in Baltimore, Maryland, using the new Diebold machines. UPDATE (11:00 AM): It must be noted that the polling place where Avi worked was not typical. Everybody seemed to know in…
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Super Tuesday
Today is a major primary election in several U.S. states. In Maryland, it will be the first use of the controversial new Diebold e-voting machines that were the subject of several negative security evaluations. Unless there are very large, obvious problems today, expect stories later in the week in which e-voting advocates say there were…
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Must-Read Books: My List
Below is my list of six must-read books on science and technology. I know: I asked you for five, and now I’ve allowed myself six. I just couldn’t narrow it down any more. Naturally, I include only books that I have read; and I must admit that I haven’t read many of the books suggested…
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Must-Read Books: Readers' Choices
Last week, I asked readers to name five must-read books on science and technology. The results are below. I included nominations from my comments section, from the comments over at Crooked Timber, and from any other blogs I spotted. This represents the consensus of about thirty people. The most-mentioned book was Hofstadter’s Goedel, Escher, Bach,…
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California Court: DeCSS Not a Trade Secret
A California state appeals court has ruled in DVD-CCA v. Bunner, holding that the DeCSS program is not a trade secret, so a lower court was wrong to order Andrew Bunner not to post the program on his website. DeCSS, you may recall, is a program that decrypts data from DVDs. It’s posted at hundreds…
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Paris Hilton: Auteur
Some day a great book will be written, dissecting the current copyright mania. And the page-three example, showing just how ridiculous things got, will be this: a legal dispute over whether Paris Hilton can claim authorship of the infamous video. [Link credit: James Grimmelmann at LawMeme.]