Category: Uncategorized
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Viacom, YouTube, and Privacy
Yesterday’s top tech policy story was the copyright lawsuits filed by Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, MTV, and Paramount Pictures, against YouTube and its owner Google. Viacom’s complaint accuses YouTube of direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement, and inducing infringement. The complaint tries to paint YouTube as a descendant of Napster and Grokster.…
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How I Became a Policy Wonk
It’s All-Request Friday, when I blog on topics suggested by readers. David Molnar writes, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how your work has come to have significant interface with public policy questions. Was this a conscious decision, did it “just happen,” or somewhere in between? Is this the kind of work you…
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Fact check: The New Yorker versus Wikipedia
In July—when The New Yorker ran a long and relatively positive piece about Wikipedia—I argued that the old-media method of laboriously checking each fact was superior to the wiki model, where assertions have to be judged based on their plausibility. I claimed that personal experience as a journalist gave me special insight into such matters,…
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Introducing All-Request Friday
Adapting an idea from Tyler Cowen, I’m going to try a new feature, where on Fridays I post about topics suggested by readers. Please post your suggested topics in the comments.
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Manipulating Reputation Systems
BoingBoing points to a nice pair of articles by Annalee Newitz on how people manipulate online reputation systems like eBay’s user ratings, Digg, and so on. There’s a myth floating around that such systems distill an uncannily accurate folk judgment from the votes submitted by millions of ordinary citizens. The wisdom of crowds, and all…
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Sarasota: Could a Bug Have Lost Votes?
At this point, we still don’t know what caused the high undervote rate in Sarasota’s Congressional election. [Background: 1, 2.] There are two theories. The State-commissioned study released last week argues that for the theory that a badly designed ballot caused many voters to not see that race and therefore not cast a vote. Today…
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Why Understanding Programs is Hard
Senator Sam Brownback has reportedly introduced a bill that would require the people rating videogames to play the games in their entirety before giving a rating. This reflects a misconception common among policymakers: that it’s possible to inspect a program and figure out what it’s going to do. It’s true that some programs can be…
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AACS: Slow Start on Traitor Tracing
[Previous posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.] Alex wrote on Thursday about the next step in the breakdown of AACS, the encryption scheme used on next-gen DVD discs (HD-DVD and Blu-ray): last week a person named Arnezami discovered and published a processing key that apparently can be used to…
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AACS: A Tale of Three Keys
[Previous posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.] This week brings further developments in the gradual meltdown of AACS (the encryption scheme used for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs). Last Sunday, a member of the Doom9 forum, writing under the pseudonym Arnezami, managed to extract a “processing key” from an HD-DVD player…
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Is there any such thing as “enough” technological progress?
Yesterday, Ed considered the idea that there may be “a point of diminishing returns where more capacity doesn’t improve the user’s happiness.†It’s a provocative concept, and one that I want to probe a bit further. One observation that seems germane is that such thoughts have a pedigree. Henry L. Ellsworth, , in his 1843…