Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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Assessing PACER's Access Barriers
The U.S. Courts recently conducted a year-long assessment of their Electronic Public Access program which included a survey of PACER users. While the results of the assessment haven’t been formally published, the Third Branch Newsletter has an interview with Bankruptcy Judge J. Rich Leonard that discusses a few high-level findings of the survey. Judge Leonard…
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New Search and Browsing Interface for the RECAP Archive
We have written in the past about RECAP, our project to help make federal court documents more easily accessible. We continue to upgrade the system, and we are eager for your feedback on a new set of functionality. One of the most-requested RECAP features is a better web interface to the archive. Today we’re releasing…
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My Work at CITP This Year: Judicial Policy, Public Access, and The Electronic Court
Hi. My name is Ron Hedges. I am a Visiting Research Collaborator with the CITP for 2010-11. Let me tell you a little about myself. I am a graduate of the University of Maryland and Georgetown University Law Center. I spent over twenty years as a United States Magistrate Judge and sat in Newark, NJ.…
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Jailbreaking Copyright's Extended Scope
A bit late for the rule’s “triennial” cycle, the Librarian of Congress has released the sec 1201(a)(1)(C) exceptions from the DMCA prohibitions on circumventing copyright access controls. For the next three years, people will not be ” circumventing” if they “jailbreak” or unlock their smartphones, remix short portions of motion pictures on DVD (if they…
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Private Information in Public Court Filings
Court proceedings are supposed to be public. When they are public and easily accessible, citizens know the law and the courts are kept accountable. These are the principles that underpin RECAP, our project to help liberate federal court records from behind a pay-wall. However, appropriate restrictions on public disclosure are equally critical to democracy-enhancing information…