Category: Uncategorized
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Counterfeits, Trojan Horses, and shady distributors
Last Friday, the New York Times published an article about counterfeit Cisco products that have been sold as if they were genuine and are widely used throughout the U.S. government. The article also raised the concern that these counterfeits could well be engineered with malicious intent, but that this appears not to have been the…
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DRM Not Dead, Just Temporarily Indisposed, Says RIAA Tech Head
The RIAA’s head technology guy says that the move away from DRM (anti-copying) technology by record labels is just a phase, according to a Greg Sandoval story at News.com: “(Recently) I made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still require DRM,” said David Hughes, who heads up the…
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Stupidest Infotech Policy Contest
James Fallows at the Atlantic recently ran a reader contest to nominate the worst public policy decision of the past fifty years. (<a href="http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/stupidest_policy_ever_contest_1.php"The winner? Ethanol subsidies.) I’d like to do the same for technology policy. Readers, please submit your suggestions for the stupidest infotech policy ever. An ideal submission is an infotech policy that…
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30th Anniversary of First Spam Email; No End in Sight
Today marks the 30th anniversary of (what is reputed to be) the first spam email. Here’s the body of the email: DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM AND…
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spammers gone wild
I’m sure this sort of behavior is old news, but it’s still really annoying. Starting last night and continuing as I’m writing this, some annoying spammer has been forging my email address as the “From” line of a variety of spams. This is causing a staggering volume of backscatter, mostly of the “Delivery Status Notification…
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Bizarre Undervote on iVotronic in France
In France, most municipalities use paper ballots in elections, but a few places have begun using DRE (direct-recording electronic) machines. Pierre Muller, a French computer scientist, has recently sent me a report of a malfunction by an ES&S iVotronic machine in a recent municipal election. In this spring’s elections (and he believes this also happened…
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voting ID requirements and the Supreme Court
Last week, I posted here about voter ID requirements. There was a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court on the same topic. It seems Indiana was trying to require voters to present ID in order to vote. Lawsuit. In the end, the court found that the requirement wasn’t particularly onerous (the New York Times’s…
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Future of News Workshop, May 14-15 in Princeton
We’ve got a great lineup of speakers for our upcoming “Future of News” workshop. It’s May 14-15 in Princeton. It’s free, and if you register we’ll feed you lunch. Agenda Wednesday, May 14, 2008 9:30 – 10:45 Registration 10:45 – 11:00 Welcoming Remarks 11:00 – 12:00 Keynote talk by Paul Starr 12:00 – 1:30 Lunch,…
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Voluntary Collective Licensing and Extortion
Reihan Salam has a new piece at Slate about voluntary collective licensing of music (which was also the topic of an online symposium organized by our center at Princeton). I’m generally a fan of Reihan’s work, but this time I think he got it wrong. His piece starts like this: What would you do if…
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How can we require ID for voters?
Recently, HR 5036 was shot down in Congress. That bill was to provide “emergency” money to help election administrators who wished to replace paperless voting systems with optically scanned paper ballots (or to add paper-printing attachments to existing electronic voting systems). While the bill initially received strong bipartisan support, it was opposed at the last…