Category: Uncategorized
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Staying Off the Regulatory Radar
I just returned from a tech policy conference. It was off the record so I can’t tell you about what was said. But I can tell you that it got me thinking about what happens when a tech startup appears on policymakers’ radar screens. Policymakers respond to what they see. Generally they don’t see startups,…
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Apple's File Labeling: An Effective Anticopying Tool?
Recently it was revealed that Apple’s new DRM-free iTunes tracks come with the buyer’s name encoded in their headers. Randy Picker suggested that this might be designed to deter copying – if you redistribute a file you bought, your name would be all over it. It would be easy for Apple, or a copyright owner,…
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Why So Much Attention to "What's a Website?" Judge?
One of the benefits of talking to the press is that reporters often ask thought-provoking questions. Recently Noam Cohen, a New York Times columnist, called and asked me why the Net community gets so excited when a public figure professes ignorance about the Net. It’s natural for people to chuckle at Ted “Tubes†Stevens or…
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The Slingbox Pro: Information Leakage and Variable Bitrate (VBR) Fingerprints
[Today’s guest blogger is Yoshi Kohno, a Computer Science prof at University of Washington who has done interesting work on security and privacy topics including e-voting. – Ed] If you follow technology news, you might be aware of the buzz surrounding technologies that mate the Internet with your TV. The Slingbox Pro and the Apple…
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Finnish Court: Okay to Circumvent DVD DRM
A court in Finland ruled last week that it is not a violation of that nation’s anticircumvention law to circumvent CSS, the copy protection system in DVDs. Mikko Välimäki, one of the defense lawyers, has the best explanation I’ve seen. Finnish law bans the circumvention of “effective” DRM (copy protection) technologies. The court ruled that…
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Newsweek Ranks Schools; Monkey High Still Tops
Newsweek has once again issued its list of America’s Best High Schools. They’re using the same goofy formula as before: the number of students from a school who show up for AP or IB exams, divided by the number who graduate. Just showing up for an exam raises your school’s rating; graduating lowers your school’s…
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What's the Biggest Impact of IT on Copyright?
On Saturday I gave a talk (“Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue: Technology, Politics, and the Fight to Control Digital Media”) for a Princeton alumni group in Seattle. The theme of the talk is that the rise of information technology is causing a “great earthquake” in media businesses. Many people believe that the biggest impact of IT…
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AACS Updated, Broken Again
[Other posts in this series] We predicted in past posts that AACS, the encryption system intended to protect HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies, would suffer a gradual meltdown from its inability to respond quickly enough to attacks. Like most DRM, AACS depends on the secrecy of encryption keys built into hardware and software players. An attacker…
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If It's Not Snake Oil, It's Pretty Awesome (Part 2)
Four years ago I wrote about a company called Music Public Broadcasting: In today’s Los Angeles Times, Jon Healey writes about a new DRM proposal from a company called Music Public Broadcasting. The company’s claims, which are not substantiated in the story, give off a distinct aroma of snake oil. I went on to document…
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HBO Exec Wants to Rename DRM
People have had lots of objections to Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology – centering mainly on its clumsiness and the futility of its anti-infringement rationale – but until recently nobody had complained that the term “Digital Rights Management” was insufficiently Orwellian. That changed on Tuesday, when HBO’s Chief Technology Officer, Bob Zitter, suggested at an…