Category: Uncategorized
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Taking Stevens Seriously
From the lowliest blogger to Jon Stewart, everybody is laughing at Sen. Ted Stevens and his remarks (1.2MB mp3) on net neutrality. The sound bite about the Internet being “a series of tubes” has come in for for the most ridicule. I’ll grant that Stevens sounds pretty confused on the recording. But’s let’s give the…
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CleanFlicks Ruled an Infringer
Joe Gratz writes, Judge Richard P. Matsch of the United States District Court for the District of Colorado [on] Wednesday filed this opinion granting partial summary judgment in favor of the movie studios, finding that CleanFlicks infringes copyright. This is not a terribly surprising result; CleanFlicks’ business involves selling edited DVD-Rs of Hollywood movies, buying…
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University-Purchased Music Services a Bust
When universities buy music service subscriptions for their students, few students use them, according to Nick Timiraos’s story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Students tend to download music illegally, or buy it from iTunes instead. In explaining the popularity of Napster and other file-sharing systems, commentators have often overemphasized the price factor and underestimated convenience.…
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Why Do Innovation Clusters Form?
Recently I attended a very interesting conference about high-tech innovation and public policy, with experts in various fields. (Such a conference will be either boring or fascinating, depending on who exactly is invited. This one was great.) One topic of discussion was how innovation clusters form. “Innovation cluster” is the rather awkward term for a…
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Does the Great Firewall Violate U.S. Law?
Clayton, Murdoch, and Watson have an interesting new paper describing technical mechanisms that the Great Firewall of China uses to block online access to content the Chinese government doesn’t like. The Great Firewall works in two parts. One part inspects data packets that cross the border between China and the rest of the world, looking…
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Long-Tail Innovation
Recently I saw a great little talk by Cory Ondrejka on the long tail of innovation. (He followed up with a blog entry.) For those not in the know, “long tail” is one of the current buzzphrases of tech punditry. The term was coined by Chris Anderson in a famous Wired article. The idea is…
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21st Century Wiretapping: Risk of Abuse
Today I’m returning, probably for the last time, to the public policy questions surrounding today’s wiretapping technology. Thus far in the series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) I have described how technology enables wiretapping based on automated recognition of certain features of a message (rather than individualized suspicion of a person), I…
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Freeing the Xbox
When Microsoft shipped its Xbox game console, Linux programmers salivated. The Xbox was a pretty nice computer, priced at $149. The Xbox had all the hardware needed to run Linux and its applications. Problem was, Microsoft had tried to lock down the Xbox hardware to prevent unauthorized programs – such as the Linux kernel –…
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How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Ah, summer, when a man’s thoughts turn to … ski jumping? On Sunday I had the chance to try ski jumping, at the Swiss national team’s training center at Einsiedeln. My companions and I – or at least the ones foolish enough to try, which of course included me – donned thick neoprene bodysuits, gloves,…
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Syndromic Surveillance: 21st Century Data Harvesting
[This article was written by a pseudonymous reader who calls him/herself Enigma Foundry. I’m publishing it here because I think other readers would find it interesting. – Ed Felten] The recent posts about 21st Century Wiretapping described a government program which captured, stored, filtered and analyzed large quantities of information, information which the government had…