Category: Uncategorized
-
Targeted Copyright Enforcement vs. Inaccurate Enforcement
Let’s continue our discussion about copyright enforcement against online infringers. I wrote last time about how targeted enforcement can deter many possible violators even if the enforcer can only punish a few violators. Clever targeting of enforcement can destroy the safety-in-numbers effect that might otherwise shelter a crowd of would-be violators. In the online copyright…
-
Targeted Copyright Enforcement: Deterring Many Users with a Few Lawsuits
One reason the record industry’s strategy of suing online infringers ran into trouble is that there are too many infringers to sue. If the industry can only sue a tiny fraction of infringers, then any individual infringer will know that he is very unlikely to be sued, and deterrence will fail. Or so it might…
-
New York AG Files Antitrust Suit Against Intel
Yesterday, New York’s state Attorney General filed what could turn out to be a major antitrust suit against Intel. The suit accuses Intel of taking illegal steps to exclude a competitor, AMD, from the market. All we have so far is the NYAG’s complaint, which tells one side of the case. Intel will have ample…
-
DRM by any other name: The latest from Hollywood
Sunday’s New York Times had an article, Studios’ Quest for Life After DVDs. To nobody’s surprise, consumers want to have convenient access to “their” media, wherever they happen to be, without all the annoying restrictions that come into play when you add DRM to the picture. To many people’s surprise, sales of DVDs (much less…
-
There’s anonymity on the Internet. Get over it.
In a recent interview prominent antivirus developer Eugene Kaspersky decried the role of anonymity in cybercrime. This is not a new claim – it is touched on in the Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency Report and Cybersecurity Act of 2009, among others – but it misses the mark. Any Internet design would allow…
-
Intractability of Financial Derivatives
A new result by Princeton computer scientists and economists shows a striking application of computer science theory to the field of financial derivative design. The paper is Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products by Sanjeev Arora, Boaz Barak, Markus Brunnermeier, and Rong Ge. Although computation has long been used in the financial industry…
-
Sidekick Users' Data Lost: Blame the Cloud?
Users of Sidekick mobile phones saw much of their data disappear last week due to engineering problems at a Microsoft data center. Sidekick devices lose the contents of their memory when they don’t have power (e.g. when the battery is being changed), so all data is transmitted to a data center for permanent storage –…
-
PrivAds: Behavioral Advertising without Tracking
There’s an interesting new paper out of Stanford and NYU, about a system called “PrivAds” that tries to provide behavioral advertising on web sites, without having a central server gather detailed information about user behavior. If the paper’s approach turns out to work, it could have an important impact on the debate about online advertising…
-
Chilling and Warming Effects
For several years, the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse has cataloging the effects of legal threats on online expression and helping people to understand their rights. Amid all the chilling we continue to see, it’s welcome to see rays of sunshine when bloggers stand up to threats, helping to stop the cycle of threat-and-takedown. The BoingBoing team…
-
Privacy as a Social Problem, Not a Technology Problem
Bob Blakley had an interesting post Monday, arguing that technologists tend to frame the privacy issue poorly. (I would add that many non-technologists use the same framing.) Here’s a sample: That’s how privacy works; it’s not about secrecy, and it’s not about control: it’s about sociability. Privacy is a social good which we give to…