Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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NIST Recommends Not Certifying Paperless Voting Machines
In an important development in e-voting policy, NIST has issued a report recommending that the next-generation federal voting-machine standards be written to prevent (re-)certification of today’s paperless e-voting systems. (NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency, previously called the National Bureau of Standards, that is a leading source of independent…
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Duck Amuck and the Takedown Gun
I wrote last week (1, 2) about the CopyBot tool in Second Life, which can make an exact lookalike copy of any object, and the efforts of users to contain CopyBot’s social and economic effects. Attempts to stop CopyBot by technology will ultimately fail – in a virtual world, anything visible is copyable – so…
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DMCA Exemptions Granted
Last Wednesday afternoon the U.S. Copyright Office released its list of DMCA exemptions for the next three years. The timing is interesting: releasing news in the afternoon of the day before Thanksgiving is a near-optimal strategy if you want that news to escape notice and coverage in the U.S. The purpose of these exemptions are…
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Will It Copy?
In the spirit of the cult “Will It Blend?” videos, today’s question on Freedom to Tinker is “Will It Copy?” As we saw with the CopyBot in Second Life, when something becomes easily copyable, the economics of its production change: users benefit more from already-existing objects, but the incentive to make new objects decreases. This…
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CopyBot Roils SecondLife Economy
Here’s one from the It-Was-Only-a-Matter-of-Time file. Somebody in SecondLife, a popular multiplayer virtual world, created a gadget called the CopyBot, which can make a perfect copy of any object in the SecondLife world. (Here’s a Reuters story.) This raises some interesting technical issues, but I want to focus today on how it effects SecondLife’s economy.…
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New Congress, Same Old Issues
With control of the House and Senate about to switch parties, everybody is wondering how the new management will affect their pet policy issues. Cameron Wilson has a nice forecast for tech policy issues such as competitiveness, globalization, privacy, DRM, and e-voting. Most of these don’t break down as partisan issues – differences are larger…
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Microsoft to Pay Per-Processor License on Zune
Last week Universal Music Group (UMG), one of the major record companies, announced a deal with Microsoft, under which UMG would receive a royalty for every Zune music player Microsoft sells. (Zune is Microsoft’s new iPod competitor.) This may be a first. Apple doesn’t pay a per-iPod fee to record companies; instead it pays a…