Category: Uncategorized
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Nuts and Bolts of Net Discrimination: Encryption
I’ve written several times recently about the technical details of network discrimination, because understanding these details is useful in the network neutrality debate. Today I want to talk about the role of encryption. Scenarios for network discrimination typically involve an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who looks at users’ traffic and imposes delays or other performance…
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Facebook and the Campus Cops
An interesting mini-controversy developed at Princeton last week over the use of the Facebook.com web site by Princeton’s Public Safety officers (i.e., the campus police). If you’re not familiar with Facebook, you must not be spending much time on a college campus. Facebook is a sort of social networking site for college students, faculty and…
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NYU/Princeton Spyware Workshop Liveblog
Today I’m at the NYU/Princeton spyware workshop. I’ll be liveblogging the workshop here. I won’t give you copious notes on what each speaker says, just a list of things that strike me as interesting. Videos of the presentations will be available on the net eventually. I gave a basic tutorial on spyware last night, to…
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RFID Virus Predicted
Melanie Rieback, Bruno Crispo, and Andy Tanenbaum have a new paper describing how RFID tags might be used to propagate computer viruses. This has garnered press coverage, including a John Markoff story in today’s New York Times. The underlying technical argument is pretty simple. An RFID tag is a tiny device, often affixed to a…
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Discrimination, Congestion, and Cooperation
I’ve been writing lately about the nuts and bolts of network discrimination. Today I want to continue that discussion by talking about how the Internet responds to congestion, and how network discrimination might affect that response. As usual, I’ll simplify the story a bit to spare you a lengthy dissertation on network management, but I…
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Where to Go, and What to Read
We don’t have a “real” post today, just plugs for two good things. (1) The NYU/Princeton interdisciplinary workshop on spyware will be next Thursday (evening) and Friday (day), in New York. It’s free and open to the public. Please let us know if you plan to come. (2) Students in my course on Information Technology…
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RIAA Says Future DRM Might "Threaten Critical Infrastructure and Potentially Endanger Lives"
We’re in the middle of the U.S. Copyright Office’s triennial DMCA exemption rulemaking. As you might expect, most of the filings are dry as dust, but buried in the latest submission by a coalition of big copyright owners (publishers, Authors’ Guild, BSA, MPAA, RIAA, etc.) is an utterly astonishing argument. Some background: In light of…
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Nuts and Bolts of Net Discrimination, Part 2
Today I want to continue last week’s discussion of how network discrimination might actually occur. Specifically, I want to talk about packet reordering. Recall that an Internet router is a device that receives packets of data on some number of incoming links, decides on which outgoing link each packet should be forwarded, and sends packets…
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USACM Policy Statement on DRM
I’m pleased to post here a new policy statement on DRM, issued by USACM, the U.S. public policy committee of ACM, the leading professional society for computer scientists. It’s a balanced yet strong statement of principles that can be applied to many public policy questions relating to DRM. I helped to draft it, and I…
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Nuts and Bolts of Network Discrimination
One of the reasons the network neutrality debate is so murky is that relatively few people understand the mechanics of traffic discrimination. I think that in reasoning about net neutrality it helps to understand how discrimination would actually be put into practice. That’s what I want to explain today. Don’t worry, the details aren’t very…