Category: Uncategorized
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NJ court permits release of post-trial briefs in voting case
In 2009 the Superior Court of New Jersey, Law Division, held a trial on the legality of using paperless direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. Plaintiffs in the suit argued that because it’s so easy to replace the software in a DRE with fraudulent software that cheats in elections, DRE voting systems do not guarantee the…
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Court permits release of unredacted report on AVC Advantage
In the summer of 2008 I led a team of computer scientists in examining the hardware and software of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. I did this as a pro-bono expert witness for the Plaintiffs in the New Jersey voting-machine lawsuit. We were subject to a Protective Order that, in essence, permitted publication of…
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HTC Willfully Violates the GPL in T-Mobile's New G2 Android Phone
[UPDATE (Oct 14, 2010): HTC has released the source code. Evidently 90-120 days was not in fact necessary, given that they managed to do it 7 days after the phone’s official release. It is possible that the considerable pressure from the media, modders, kernel copyright holders, and other kernel hackers contributed to the apparently accelerated…
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General Counsel's Role in Shoring Up Authentication Practices Used in Secure Communications
Business conducted over the Internet has benefited hugely from web-based encryption. Retail sales, banking transactions, and secure enterprise applications have all flourished because of the end-to-end protection offered by encrypted Internet communications. An encrypted communication, however, is only as secure as the process used to authenticate the parties doing the communicating. The major Internet browsers…
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Did a denial-of-service attack cause the flash crash? Probably not.
Last June I wrote about an analysis from Nanex.com claiming that a kind of spam called “quote stuffing” on the NYSE network may have caused the “flash crash” of shares on the New York Stock Exchange, May 6, 2010. I wrote that this claim was “interesting if true, and interesting anyway”. It turns out that…
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Advice for New Graduate Students
[Ed Felten says: This is the time of year when professors offer advice to new students. My colleague Prof. Jennifer Rexford gave a great talk to a group of our incoming engineering Ph.D. students, about how to make the most of graduate school. Here’s what she said: ] Those of you who know me, know…
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Understanding the HDCP Master Key Leak
On Monday, somebody posted online an array of numbers which purports to be the secret master key used by HDCP, a video encryption standard used in consumer electronics devices such as DVD players and TVs. I don’t know if the key is genuine, but let’s assume for the sake of discussion that it is. What…
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Why did anybody believe Haystack?
Haystack, a hyped technology that claimed to help political dissidents hide their Internet traffic from their governments, has been pulled by its promoters after independent researchers got a chance to study it and found severe problems. This should come as a surprise to nobody. Haystack exhibited the warning signs of security snake oil: the flamboyant,…
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A Software License Agreement Takes it On the Chin
[Update: This post was featured on Slashdot.] [Update: There are two discrete ways of asking whether a court decision is “correct.” The first is to ask: is the law being applied the same way here as it has been applied in other cases? We can call this first question the “legal question.” The second is…