Category: Uncategorized
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Law Firm Accused of Computer Intrusion
According to James Grimaldi’s column in Monday’s Washington Post, lawyers at the prominent firm Jones Day are accused of making unauthorized accesses to the password-protected web site of an opposing expert witness. Grimaldi writes, W. Kelly Stewart, of Jones Day’s Dallas office, testified last month that he entered Egilman’s site after Jones Day attempted and…
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Apparent Overblocking by CyberPatrol
Today, while visiting a large company, I tried to visit some of the websites on this site’s link-list. I found that three of them were blocked due to “possibly inappropriate content.” The three blocked sites were Eszter Hargittai’s blog, Arnold Kling’s “The Bottom Line”, and Donna Wentworth’s “CopyFight”. (The whole Corante site, which hosts several…
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More On Elcomsoft's Acquittal
Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy explains why ElcomSoft’s ignorance of the law was an excuse in this instance. Also, some are suggesting that jury nullification may have played a role in ElcomSoft’s acquittal. (“Jury nullification” refers to a jury’s refusal to find guilt under a law because they consider that law unjust.) An AP…
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ElcomSoft Acquitted
Lisa Bowman at news.com reports that the jury has found ElcomSoft not guilty of criminally violating the DMCA. It will be interesting to watch the reaction to this. Some people may try to read a lot into the verdict, but this is probably a mistake. Apparently, the verdict relied not on the drawbacks of the…
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NYT: Wi-Fi Interferes With Military Radars
In today’s New York Times, John Markoff writes that the Wi-Fi standard for wireless networking may interfere with certain military radars. If the interference turns out to be serious, this is a major headache. Wi-Fi is one of the best new technologies to come along in a while, and it seems to be headed for…
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Google in the Spotlight
Interesting article by Josh McHugh in the January 2003 issue Wired, on Google’s attempts to keep itself on the right side of various policy issues. It’s much easier to steer clear of the tough issues when you’re small. Now that Google is so popular and powerful, policy challenges abound.
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Sloppy Science
New Scientist reports on how scientists prepare their papers for publication: A cunning statistical study has exposed scientists as sloppy reporters. When they write up their work and cite other people’s papers, most do not bother to read the original. The discovery was made by Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California,…
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We're #22!
Seventeen Magazine has released its long-awaited “100 Coolest Colleges” list. Princeton ranks 22nd. Yale ranks second, probably due to the influence of the ultracool LawMeme crowd. You have to wonder, though, about anybody who ranks my alma mater, Caltech, as the fifteenth-coolest school in the country. Caltech has many virtues, but coolness is definitely not…
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Privacy Technology vs. Privacy Laws
Politech reprints an anonymous, somewhat overheated essay arguing for a technology-only approach to privacy, as opposed to one based on laws. It’s easy to dismiss an essay like this just because of its obnoxious tone. But we should be skeptical of its ideas too. Certainly, we ought to use privacy-enhancing technology when it is available,…
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TIA Discussion at Politech
Lots of postings recently over at Politech about DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program. Check it out, if you’re interested.