Category: Uncategorized
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Crackdown at the Naval Academy
According to The Capital, which appears to be a local newspaper in Annapolis, officials at the Naval Academy have seized the computers of nearly 100 midshipmen (i.e., students at the Academy) because of suspected file sharing activity. Some people paint this as an “RIAA goes after the Navy” story. But based on the newspaper article,…
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Blog Comment Spam
I saw my first blog-comment spam today. David Weinberger’s posting on open spectrum had one comment: a standard-issue Nigerian scam message. How much longer before we see Trackback spam?
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Lobbyists to Solve Copyright Problem
Declan McCullagh at news.com reports that “Technology and entertainment lobbyists will sit down at the negotiating table [today] to seek a resolution to the long-running political spat over digital copyright.” The article makes the alarming but unstated assumption that the last Congress’s refusal to pass any “anti-piracy” bills is actually a problem. When Congress rejects…
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RIAA's Anti-Infringement Site Infringes
I swear I’m not making this up. DSLReports observes that the RIAA’s new anti-infringement website, UnitedMusic, contained material copied without permission from a page at the University of Chicago. The RIAA has now removed the apparently infringing material.
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My Worst Fears, Confirmed
Cory Doctorow points to a new tool, GetContentSize, that evaluates what portion of a Web site is content, as opposed to formatting and other junk. When applied to this site, here is GetContentSize’s report: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com Total page size: 32939 bytes (not including images, attached scripts or style sheets) … [NO CONTENT] UPDATE (1:00 PM): Adrian…
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Post-Napster File Sharing at Princeton
Today’s issue of the Daily Princetonian, our student newspaper, reports on file sharing issues on campus. (Note that the article has its facts wrong about the Napster case. Napster was not found to have violated the DMCA. Napster’s legal problems had to do with contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.)
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Report from the ACM DRM Workshop
Yesterday I attended the ACM “Digital Rights Management” Workshop in Washington DC. There were about 100 attendees, most of them computer scientists, with a few lawyers and Washington policy types thrown in. Papers from the workshop are available online. My main impression was that the speakers were more openly skeptical about DRM than at past…
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In Search of Technology News
I still remember the first time I saw a newspaper that had a technology section. It seemed to herald the arrival of technology in the mainstream of American life, and to offer the public a chance to understand how life was about to change. Lately I have begun to wonder whether the technology section is…
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Virus With a EULA
Rob Lemos at news.com reports on a new “greeting card” virus that protects its author by using a EULA (End User License Agreement): The FriendGreetings electronic greeting card has all the hallmarks of a mass-mailing computer virus. The e-mail misleads a victim into downloading an application–ostensibly to view a Web card–and then sends itself to…
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A Stroll Through the Logs
The website statistics program I use (webalizer) lets me see what search strings people are using when they find this site via the usual search engines. November’s report is amusing. The most common search string that led to the site is “tinker.” No surprise there. Number two, though, was “fart noises.” (That matches a Fritz’s…