Category: Uncategorized
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Satyam and the Inadvertent Web
Satyam is one of the handful of large companies who dominate the IT outsourcing market in India, A week ago today, B. Ramalinga Raju, the company chairman, confessed to a years-long accounting fraud. More than a billion dollars of cash the company claimed to have on hand, and the business success that putatively generated those…
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Debugging the Zune Blackout
On December 31, some models of the Zune, Microsoft’s portable music player, went dark. The devices were unusable until the following day. Failures like this are sometimes caused by complex chains of mishaps, but this particular one is due to a single programming error that is reasonably easy to understand. Let’s take a look. Here…
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Predictions for 2009
Here are our predictions for 2009. These are based on input from Andrew Appel, Joe Calandrino, Will Clarkson, Ari Feldman, Ed Felten, Alex Halderman, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Tim Lee, Paul Ohm, David Robinson, Dan Wallach, Harlan Yu, and Bill Zeller. Please note that individual contributors (including me) don’t necessarily agree with all of these predictions.…
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2008 Predictions Scorecard
As usual, we’ll kick off the new year by reviewing the predictions we made for the previous year. Here now, our 2008 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. We predict this every year,…
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Taking Advantage of Citizen Contrarians
In my last post, I argued that sifting through citizens’ questions for the President is a job best done outside of government. More broadly, there’s a class of input that is good for government to receive, but that probably won’t be welcome at the staff level, where moment-to-moment success is more of a concern than…
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Government Shouldn't "Help" Citizens Pick Tough Questions for Obama
A couple of weeks ago, Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica, Ben Smith at Politico and others noted a disturbing pattern on the incoming Obama administration’s Change.gov website: polite but pointed user-submitted questions about the Blagojevich scandal and other potentially uncomfortable topics were being flagged as “inappropriate” by other visitors to the site. In less than…
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Internet voting-a-go-go
Yes, we know that there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system, but the Estonians are doing their best to get as far away from perfection as possible. According to the latest news reports, Estonia is working up a system to vote from mobile phones. This follows on their earlier web-based Internet voting. What…
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The DC Metro and the Invisible Hand
My friend Tom Lee has been pestering the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the agency that runs the DC area’s public transit system, to publish its schedule data in an open format. That will allow companies like Google to include the information in products like Google Transit. It seems that Google has been negotiating with…
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The Journal Misunderstands Content-Delivery Networks
There’s been a lot of buzz today about this Wall Street Journal article that reports on the shifting positions of some of the leading figures of the network neutrality movement. Specifically, it claims that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have abandoned their prior commitment to network neutrality. It also claims that Larry Lessig has “softened” his…
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Election Transparency Project Finds Ballot-Counting Bug
Yesterday, Kim Zetter at Wired News reported an amazing e-voting story about lost ballots and the public advocates who found them. Here’s a summary: Humboldt County, California has an innovative program to put on the Internet scanned images of all the optical-scan ballots cast in the county. In the online archive, citizens found 197 ballots…