Category: Uncategorized
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How Much Bandwidth is Enough?
It is a matter of faith among infotech experts that (1) the supply of computing and communications will increase rapidly according to Moore’s Law, and (2) the demand for that capacity will grow roughly as fast. This mutual escalation of supply and demand causes the rapid change we see in the industry. It seems to…
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SonyBMG (Accidentally?) Giving Away MP3 of New Billy Joel Song
Billy Joel’s new song, “All My Life” is being released in stages. Presently it’s available for free streaming from People Magazine’s site. Later in the month it will be available for purchase only at the iTunes Music store. After that it will be released in other online stores. Or at least that was the plan…
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Apple Offers to Sell DRM-Free Music
The Net is buzzing with talk about the open letter posted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs yesterday. In an apparent reversal, Jobs offers to sell MP3 files, free of anti-copying DRM technology, on the iTunes Music Store if the major record companies allow it. Much as I would like to see Apple renounce DRM entirely,…
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Sarasota: Limited Investigations
As I wrote last week, malfunctioning voting machines are one of the two plausible theories that could explain the mysterious undervotes in Sarasota’s congressional race. To get a better idea of whether malfunctions could be the culprit, we would have to investigate – to inspect the machines and their software for any relevant errors in…
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Why So Many Undervotes in Sarasota?
The big e-voting story from November’s election was in Sarasota, Florida, where a congressional race was decided by about 400 votes, with 18,412 undervotes. That’s 18,412 voters who cast votes in other races but not, according to the official results, in that congressional race. Among voters who used the ES&S iVotronic machines – that is,…
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Record Companies Boxed In By Their Own Rhetoric
Reports are popping up all over that the major record companies are cautiously gearing up to sell music in MP3 format, without any DRM (anti-copying) technology. This was the buzz at the recent Midem conference, according to a New York Times story. The record industry has worked for years to frame the DRM issue, with…
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Wikipedia Leads; Will Search Engines NoFollow?
Wikipedia has announced that all of its outgoing hyperlinks will now include the rel=”nofollow” attribute, which instructs search engines to disregard the links. Search engines infer a page’s importance by seeing who links to it – pages that get many links, especially from important sites, are deemed important and are ranked highly in search results.…
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AACS: Modeling the Battle
[Posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.] By this point in our series on AACS (the encryption scheme used in HD-DVD and Blu-ray) it should be clear that AACS creates a nontrivial strategic game between the AACS central authority (representing the movie studios) and the attackers who want to defeat AACS.…
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AACS: Sequence Keys and Tracing
[Posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.] This is the sixth post in our series on AACS, the encryption scheme used for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. It’s time to introduce another part of AACS: the Sequence Key mechanism. Throughout our AACS discussion, we have done our best to simplify things so…
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AACS: Title Keys Start Leaking
[Posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.] Last week we predicted that people would start extracting the title key (the cryptographic key needed to decrypt the contents of a particular next-gen DVD disc) from HD-DVD discs. Indeed, it turns out that WinDVD, a popular software player that runs on PCs, leaves…