Category: Uncategorized
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Music Industry Under Fire for Exploring EFF Suggestion
Jim Griffin, a music industry consultant who is in the unusual position of being recognized as smart and reasonable by participants across a broad swath of positions in the copyright debate, revealed last week that he’s working to start a new music industry organization that will urge ISPs to bundle a music licensing fee into…
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An Inconvenient Truth About Privacy
One of the lessons we’ve learned from Al Gore is that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. We all like to tool around in our SUVs, but too much driving leads to global warning. We must all take responsibility for our own carbon emissions. The same goes for online privacy, except…
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Comcast and BitTorrent: Why You Can't Negotiate with a Protocol
The big tech policy news yesterday was Comcast’s announcement that it will stop impeding BitTorrent traffic, but instead will respond to network congestion by slowing traffic from the highest-volume users, regardless of what those users are doing. Comcast also announced a deal with BitTorrent, aimed at developing more effective ways of channeling peer-to-peer traffic through…
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California review of the ES&S AutoMARK and M100
California’s Secretary of State has been busy. It appears that ES&S (manufacturers of the Ink-a-Vote voting system, used in Los Angeles, as well as the iVotronic systems that made news in Sarasota, Florida in 2006) submitted its latest and greatest “Unity 3.0.1.1” system for California certification. ES&S systems were also considered by Ohio’s study last…
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Sequoia's Explanation, and Why It's Not the Whole Story
I wrote yesterday about discrepancies in the results reported by Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines in New Jersey. Sequoia issued a memo giving their explanation for what might have happened. Here’s the relevant part: During a primary election, the “option switches” on the operator panel must be used to activate the voting machine. The operator…
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Evidence of New Jersey Election Discrepancies
Press reports on the recent New Jersey voting discrepancies have been a bit vague about the exact nature of the evidence that showed up on election day. What has the county clerks, and many citizens, so concerned? Today I want to show you some of the evidence. The evidence is a “summary tape” printed by…
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Privacy: Beating the Commitment Problem
I wrote yesterday about a market failure relating to privacy, in which a startup company can’t convincingly commit to honoring its customers’ privacy later, after the company is successful. If companies can’t commit to honoring privacy, then customers won’t be willing to pay for privacy promises – and the market will undersupply privacy. Today I…
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Privacy and the Commitment Problem
One of the challenges in understanding privacy is how to square what people say about privacy with what they actually do. People say they care deeply about privacy and resent unexpected commercial use of information about them; but they happily give that same information to companies likely to use and sell it. If people value…
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InfoTech and Public Policy Course Blog
Postings here have been a bit sparse lately, which I hope to remedy soon. In the meantime, you can get a hearty dose of tech policy blog goodness over at my course blog, where students in my course in Information Technology and Public Policy post their thoughts on the topic.
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Cold Boot Attacks: Vulnerable While Sleeping
Our research on cold boot attacks on disk encryption has generated lots of interesting discussion. A few misconceptions seem to be floating around, though. I want to address one of them today. As we explain in our paper, laptops are vulnerable when they are “sleeping” or (usually) “hibernating”. Frequently used laptops are almost always in…