Category: Uncategorized
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Google Should Stand up for Fair Use in Books Fight
On Tuesday Judge Denny Chen rejected a proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case. My write-up for Ars Technica is here. The question everyone is asking is what comes next. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the parties will go back to the bargaining table and hammer out a third iteration of the…
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A Legacy at Risk: How the new Ministry of Culture in Brazil reversed its digital agenda
Former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has become a prominent figure in the political world. When he completed his second and last term last December, 87% of Brazilians approved his government, an unprecedented high rate. So it is not surprising that his successor Dilma Roussef, the first woman elected president in Brazil, took…
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What are the Constitutional Limits on Online Tracking Regulations?
As the conceptual contours of Do Not Track are being worked out, an interesting question to consider is whether such a regulation—if promulgated—would survive a First Amendment challenge. Could Do Not Track be an unconstitutional restriction on the commercial speech of online tracking entities? The answer would of course depend on what restrictions a potential…
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A public service rant: please fix your bibliography
Like many academics, I spend a lot of time reading and reviewing technical papers. I find myself continually surprised at the things that show up in the bibliography, so I thought it might be worth writing this down all in one place so that future conferences and whatnot might just hyperlink to this essay and…
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What an expert on seals has to say
During the New Jersey voting machines lawsuit, the State defendants tried first one set of security seals and then another in their vain attempts to show that the ROM chips containing vote-counting software could be protected against fraudulent replacement. After one or two rounds of this, Plaintiffs engaged Dr. Roger Johnston, an expert on physical…
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The trick to defeating tamper-indicating seals
In this post I’ll tell you the trick to defeating physical tamper-evident seals. When I signed on as an expert witness in the New Jersey voting-machines lawsuit, voting machines in New Jersey used hardly any security seals. The primary issues were in my main areas of expertise: computer science and computer security. Even so, when…
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Super Bust: Due Process and Domain Name Seizure
With the same made-for PR timing that prompted a previous seizure of domain names just before shopping’s “Cyber Monday,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement struck again, this time days before the Super Bowl, against “10 websites that illegally streamed live sporting telecasts and pay-per-view events over the Internet.” ICE executed seizure warrants against the 10, ATDHE.NET,…
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Predictions for 2011
As promised, the official Freedom to Tinker predictions for 2011. These predictions are the result of discussions that included myself, Joe Hall, Steve Schultze, Wendy Seltzer, Dan Wallach, and Harlan Yu, but note that we don’t individually agree with every prediction. DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs…
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2010 Predictions Scorecard
We’re running a little behind this year, but as we do every year, we’ll review the predictions we made for 2010. Below you’ll find our predictions from 2010 in italics, and the results in ordinary type. Please notify us in the comments if we missed anything. (1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread…
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Web Browser Security User Interfaces: Hard to Get Right and Increasingly Inconsistent
A great deal of online commerce, speech, and socializing supposedly happens over encrypted protocols. When using these protocols, users supposedly know what remote web site they are communicating with, and they know that nobody else can listen in. In the past, this blog has detailed how the technical protocols and legal framework are lacking. Today…