Category: Uncategorized
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Googlocracy in Action
The conventional wisdom these days is that Google is becoming less useful, because people are manipulating its rankings. The storyline goes like this: Once upon a time, back in the Golden Age, nobody knew about Google, so its rankings reflected Truth. But now that Google is famous and web authors think about the Google-implications of…
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Safire: US Blew Up Soviet Pipeline with Software Trojan Horse
William Safire tells an amazing story in his column in today’s New York Times. He says that in the early 1980’s, the U.S. government hid malicious code in oil-pipeline-control software that the Soviet Union then stole and used to control a huge trans-Siberia pipeline. The malicious code manipulated the pipelines valves and other controls in…
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Tennessee Super-DMCA: It's Baaaaaaack!
The Tennessee Super-DMCA is back. Here’s the text of the latest version. Like the previous version, which died in a past legislative session, this bill looks like an attempt to broaden existing bans on unauthorized access to cable TV and phone service. The old version was much too broad. The new version is worded more…
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Can Ownership Be Owned?
Julian Dibbell, at TerraNova, points out an issued U.S. Patent that seems to cover digital property systems of the type used by many multiplayer online games: How naive must one be, in this day and age, to spend months debating the question of virtual property without once wondering whether the question itself (or at any…
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Balancing Can Be Harder Than It Looks
Reflecting on the recent argument about Howard Dean’s old smartcard speech, Larry Lessig condemns the kind of binary thinking that would divide us all into two camps, pro-privacy vs. pro-national-security. He argues that Dean’s balanced speech was (perhaps deliberately) misread by some, with the goal of putting Dean into the extreme pro-national-security/anti-privacy camp. There is…
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Diebold Fails Yet Another Security Evaluation
A group of ex-NSA security experts, hired by the state of Maryland to evaluate the state’s Diebold electronic voting systems, found the systems riddled with basic security flaws. This confirmed two previous studies, one led by Johns Hopkins researchers and one by SAIC. Here are some excerpts from John Schwartz’s New York Times story: Electronic…
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Dean's Smart-Card Speech
Declan McCullagh at CNet news.com criticizes a speech given by Howard Dean about two years ago, in which Dean called for aggressive adoption of smartcard-based state driver’s licenses and smartcard readers. Declan highlights the privacy-endangering aspects of the smartcard agenda, and paints Dean as a hypocrite for pushing that agenda while positioning himself as pro-privacy.…
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Was the Senate File Pilfering Criminal?
Some people have argued that the Senate file pilfering could not have violated the law, because the files were reportedly on a shared network drive that was not password-protected. (See, for instance, Jack Shafer’s Slate article.) Assuming those facts, were the accesses unlawful? Here’s the relevant wording from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18…
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Senate File Pilfering "Extensive"
Charlie Savage reports in today’s Boston Globe: Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe. From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee…
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Report Critical of Internet Voting
Four respected computer scientists, members of a government-commissioned study panel, have published a report critical of SERVE, a proposed system to let overseas military people vote in elections via a website. (Links: the report itself; John Schwartz story at N.Y. Times; Dan Keating story at Washington Post.) The report’s authors are David Jefferson, Avi Rubin,…