Category: Uncategorized
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Will they ever learn? Hollywood still pursuing DRM
In today’s New York Times, we read that Hollywood is working on a grand unified video DRM scheme intended to allow for video portability, such as, for example, when you visit a hotel room, you’d like to have your videos with you. What’s sad, of course, is that you can have all of this today…
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2009 Predictions Scorecard
As usual, we’ll kick off the new year by reviewing the predictions we made for the previous year. Here now, our 2009 predictions, in italics, with hindsight in ordinary type. (1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly. By tradition this is our…
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Open Government Workshop at CITP
Here at Princeton’s CITP, we have a healthy interest in issues of open government and government transparency. With the release last week of the Open Government Directive by the Obama Administration, our normally gloomy winter may prove to be considerably brighter. In addition to creating tools like Recap and FedThread, we’ve also been thinking deeply…
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Erroneous DMCA notices and copyright enforcement, part deux
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a deluge of DMCA notices and pre-settlement letters that CoralCDN experienced in late August. This article actually received a bit of press, including MediaPost, ArsTechnica, TechDirt, and, very recently, Slashdot. I’m glad that my own experience was able to shed some light on the more insidious practices that…
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DARPA Pays MIT to Pay Someone Who Recruited Someone Who Recruited Someone Who Recruited Someone Who Found a Red Balloon
DARPA, the Defense Department’s research arm, recently sponsored a “Network Challenge” in which groups competed to find ten big red weather balloons that were positioned in public places around the U.S. The first team to discover where all the balloons were would win $40,000. A team from MIT won, using a clever method of sharing…
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Tinkering with Disclosed Source Voting Systems
As Ed pointed out in October, Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc. (“Sequoia”) announced then that it intended to publish the source code of their voting system software, called “Frontier”, currently under development. (Also see EKR’s post: “Contrarianism on Sequoia’s Disclosed Source Voting System”.) Yesterday, Sequoia made good on this promise and you can now pull the…
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Soghoian: 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight
If you’re interested at all in surveillance policy, go and read Chris Soghoian’s long and impassioned post today. Chris drops several bombshells into the debate, including an audio recording of a closed-door talk by Sprint/NexTel’s Electronic Surveillance Manager, bragging about how easy the company has made it for law enforcement to get customers’ location data…
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Tech Policy in the SkyMall Catalog
These days tech policy issues seem to pop up everywhere. During a recent flight delay, I was flipping through the SkyMall Catalog (“Holiday 2009” edition), and found tech policy even there. There were lots of ads for surveillance and recording devices, some of them clearly useful for illegal purposes: the New Agent Cam HD Color…
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Advice on stepping up to a better digital camera
This is a bit off from the usual Freedom to Tinker post, but with tomorrow being “Black Friday” and retailers offering some steep discounts on consumer electronics, many Tinker readers will be out there buying gear or will be offering buying advice to their friends. Over the past several months, several friends of mine have…
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Inaccurate Copyright Enforcement: Questionable "best" practices and BitTorrent specification flaws
[Today we welcome my Princeton Computer Science colleague Mike Freedman. Mike’s research areas include computer systems, network software, and security. He writes a technical blog about these topics at Princeton S* Network Systems — required reading for serious systems geeks like me. — Ed Felten] In the past few weeks, Ed has been writing about…