Category: Uncategorized
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U.S. Exports DMCA to Australia
Kim Weatherall notes that in the recent “Free Trade” Agreement between the U.S. and Australia, the Aussies agreed to implement a DMCA-like law, and to extend their term of copyright. Needless to say, these are both bad ideas. Kim offers a long post recounting the history of this issue in Australia. I only wonder what…
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More Journal Editors Have Declared Independence
In response to my previous post about the revolt by the editors of the Journal of Algorithms, Peter Suber points out that journal editors have “declared independence” before, at least twelve times. Peter’s blog, Open Access News is a great source for news about the trend toward open access to scholarly publications.
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NYT On "Hacking" Car Engines
In today’s New York Times, Jim Motavalli writes about people who tinker with, or replace, the software controlling their car engines. Some people do this to improve engine power or fuel efficiency, and some do it out of curiosity. In a now-standard abuse of terminology, the article labels this as “hacking”. Worse yet is this…
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Windows Source Code Leaked?
Neowin is reporting that the source code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT4 has been leaked to the Internet. I haven’t looked at the code, and I won’t, so I can’t tell you whether the report is accurate. But based on the fragmentary information available, it appears more likely than not that the leak is…
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Is BayTSP a Cyber-Trespasser?
Next week in my “IT and the Law” course, we’re discussing cyber-trespass. Reading the course materials got me to wondering whether BayTSP might be a cyber-trespasser. BayTSP is a small company that works for copyright holders, monitoring the contents of P2P networks. Among other things, they query individual computers on the P2P networks, to see…
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"Hacking" Revisited
I wrote yesterday about the degradation of the term “hacking”. Today, the perfect illustration of my point turned up: a Hacker’s Hall of Fame published by The Learning Channel. It includes legitimate uber-programmers like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, along with computer criminals like Kevin Mitnick and Vladimir Levin. Putting those guys on the same…
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Journal of Algorithms Editorial Board Revolts
The editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms has resigned en masse, to protest what they call price-gouging by Elsevier, the company that publishes the journal. The journal’s annual subscription price had risen to $700, which is beyond the reach of many libraries, not to mention individuals. The resigning board includes very distinguished computer scientists…
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Time to Retire "Hacking"
Many confidential documents are posted mistakenly on the web, allowing strangers to find them via search engines, according to a front-page article by Yuki Noguchi in today’s Washington Post. I had thought this was common knowledge, but apparently it’s not. The most striking aspect of the article, to me at least, is that doing web…
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Why I Love Diebold
One of the challenges of blogging is finding things to write about. If you want to keep a loyal audience, you have to write regularly; and sometimes it’s hard to come up with several topics a week. Happily, whenever the well is about to run dry, I can always count on Diebold to fail a…
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Staffer In Senate File Pilfering To Resign
Senate staffer Miguel Miranda will resign in the wake of the recent scandal over unauthorized accesses to the opposition’s computer files, according to Alexander Bolton’s story in The Hill. Miranda is the highest-ranking person who has been accused publicly of involvement in the accesses made by Republican staff to the Democrats’ internal strategy memos. His…