Category: Uncategorized
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Report Claims Very Serious Diebold Voting Machine Flaws
[This entry was written by Avi Rubin and Ed Felten.] A report by Harri Hursti, released today at BlackBoxVoting, describes some very serious security flaws in Diebold voting machines. These are easily the most serious voting machine flaws we have seen to date – so serious that Hursti and BlackBoxVoting decided to redact some of…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping: Recording
Yesterday I started a thread on new wiretapping technologies, and their policy implications. Today I want to talk about how we should deal with the ability of governments to record and store huge numbers of intercepted messages. In the old days, before there were huge, cheap digital storage devices, government would record an intercepted message…
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Twenty-First Century Wiretapping
The revelation that the National Security Agency has been wiretapping communications crossing the U.S. border (and possibly within the U.S.), without warrants, has started many angry conversations across the country, and rightly so. Here is an issue that challenges our most basic conception of the purposes of government and its relation to citizens. Today I…
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Return to Monkey High
Newsweek has released its annual list of America’s top high schools, using the same flawed formula as last year. Here’s what I wrote then: Here is Newsweek’s formula: “Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement and/or International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students at a…
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Happy Endings
Cameron Wilson at the USACM Policy Blog writes about a Cato Institute event about copyright policy, which was held Wednesday. The panel on the DMCA was especially interesting. (audio download; audio stream; video stream) Tim Lee, author of the recent Cato paper on the ill effects of the DMCA, spoke first. The second speaker was…
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U.S. Copyright May Get Harsher and Broader
Rep. Lamar Smith is preparing to introduce a bill in Congress that would increase penalties for copyright infringement and broaden the scope of the DMCA and other copyright laws, according to a news.com story. (The story seems to get some details of the bill wrong, so be sure to look at the bill itself before…
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Serialized Posts
Lately I’ve found myself writing short series of posts on a single topic, as with the recent sequence of four posts on HDCP security. This is a departure from the traditional style of this blog, where posts were self-contained and the topic would typically change from day to day. I typically plan out these post…
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HDCP: Why So Weak?
Today I want to wrap up (I think) the discussion on security weaknesses in HDCP, the encryption scheme used for sending very high-def video from a device like a next-gen DVD player to a TV monitor. I wrote previously (1, 2, 3) about how HDCP will inevitably fail – catastrophically – when somebody manages to…
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HDCP Could Have Been Better
I wrote Friday about weaknesses in the HDCP handshake protocol that is being used to set up encryption of very high-def TV content that is in transit from devices like next-gen DVD players to television monitors. This was not news to those who follow the area. The ideas in my post came from a 2001…
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Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes
I wrote yesterday about the HDCP/HDMI technology that Hollywood wants to use to restrict the availability of very high-def TV content. Today I want to go under the hood, explaining how the key part of HDCP, the handshake, works. I’ll leave out some mathematical niceties to simplify the explanation; full details are in a 2001…