Category: Uncategorized
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AACS Decryption Code Released
[Posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.] Decryption software for AACS, the scheme used to encrypt content on both next-gen DVD systems (HD-DVD and Blu-ray), was released recently by an anonymous programmer called Muslix. His software, called BackupHDDVD, is now available online. As shipped, it can decrypt HD-DVDs (according to its…
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2007 Predictions
This year, Alex Halderman, Scott Karlin and I put our heads together to come up with a single list of predictions. Each prediction is supported by at least two of us, except the predictions that turn out to be wrong, which must have slipped in by mistake. Our predictions for 2007: (1) DRM technology will…
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2006 Predictions Scorecard
As usual, we’ll start the new year by reviewing the predictions we made for the previous year. After our surprisingly accurate 2005 predictions, we decided to take more risks having more 2006 predictions, and making them more specific. The results, as we’ll see, were … predictable. Here now, our 2006 predictions, in italics, with hindsight…
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Holiday Stories
It’s time for our holiday hiatus. See you back here in the new year. As a small holiday gift, we’re pleased to offer updated versions of some classic Christmas stories. How the Grinch Pwned Christmas: The Grinch, determined to stop Christmas, hacks into Amazon’s servers and cancels all deliveries to Who-ville. The Whos celebrate anyway,…
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Sharecropping 2.0? Not Likely
Nick Carr has an interesting post arguing that sites like MySpace and Facebook are essentially high-tech sharecropping, exploiting the labor of the many to enrich the few. He’s wrong, I think, but in an instructive way. Here’s the core of his argument: What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value…
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Soft Coercion and the Secret Ballot
Today I want to continue our discussion of the secret ballot. (Previous posts: 1, 2.) One purpose of the secret ballot is to prevent coercion: if ballots are strongly secret, then the voter cannot produce evidence of how he voted, allowing him to lie safely to the would-be coercer about how he voted. Talk about…
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Erosion of the Secret Ballot
Voting technology has changed greatly in recent years, leading to problems with accuracy and auditability. These are important, but another trend has gotten less attention: the gradual erosion of the secret ballot. It’s useful to distinguish two separate conceptions of the secret ballot. Let’s define weak secrecy to mean that the voter has the option…
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Paper Trail Standard Advances
On Tuesday, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), the group drafting the next-generation Federal voting-machine standards, voted unanimously to have the standards require that new voting machines be software-independent, which in practice requires them to have some kind of paper trail. (Officially, TGDC is drafting “guidelines”, but the states generally require compliance with the guidelines,…
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Spam is Back
A quiet trend broke into the open today, when the New York Times ran a story by Brad Stone on the recent increase in email spam. The story claims that the volume of spam has doubled in recent months, which seems about right. Many spam filters have been overloaded, sending system administrators scrambling to buy…
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For Once, BCS Controversy Not the Computers' Fault
It’s that time of year again. You know, the time when sports pundits bad-mouth the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) for picking the wrong teams to play in college football’s championship game. The system is supposed to pick the two best teams. This year it picked Ohio State, clearly the best team, and Florida, a controversial…