Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…