Category: Uncategorized
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Discrimination Against Network Hogs
Adam Thierer has an interesting post about network neutrality over at Tech Liberation Front. He is reacting to a recent Wall Street Journal story about how some home broadband service providers (BSPs) are starting to modify their networks to block or frustrate network applications they don’t like. Why would a BSP discriminate against an application’s…
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RFID, Present and Future
One of the advantages of teaching in a good university is the opportunity to hear smart students talk to each other about complicated topics. This semester I’m teaching a graduate seminar in technology and privacy, to a group of about ten computer science and electrical engineering students. On Monday the class discussed the future of…
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Do University Honor Codes Work?
Rick Garnett over at ProfsBlawg asked his readers about student honor codes and whether they work. His readers, who seem to be mostly lawyers and law students, chimed in with quite a few comments, most of them negative. I have dealt with honor codes at two institutions. My undergraduate institution, Caltech, has a simply stated…
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Breathalyzers and Open Source
Lawyers for 150 Floridians accused of drunk driving have asked a court to order the disclosure of the source code for software running in the breathalyzer machines used by police to analyze their blood alcohol level, according to a Tom Sanders story on vunet. The defendants say they have the right to examine the machines…
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Mossberg Takes on DRM, Urges CD-DRM Boycott
Walt Mossberg, whose Personal Technology column in the Wall Street is a must-read for many influential but non-geeky technology enthusiasts, discusses the DRM issue in today’s column. No much in the column will be new to regular readers here, or to anyone immersed in the digital copyright issue. But of course Mossberg writes for a…
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EFF Researchers Decode Hidden Codes in Printer Output
Researchers at the EFF have apparently confirmed that certain color printers put hidden marks in the pages they print, and they have decoded the marks for at least one printer model. The marks from Xerox DocuColor printers are encoded in an array of very small yellow dots that appear all over the page. The dots…
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A Visit From Bill Gates
Bill Gates visited Princeton on Friday, accompanied by his father, a prominent Seattle lawyer who now heads the Gates Foundation, and by Kevin Schofield, a Microsoft exec (and Princeton alumnus) who helped to plan the university visits. After speaking briefly with Shirley Tilghman, Princeton’s president, Mr. Gates spent an hour in a roundtable discussion with…
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Tax Breaks for Security Tools
Congress may be considering offering tax breaks to companies that deploy cybersecurity tools, according to an Anne Broache story at news.com. This might be a good idea, depending on how it’s done. I’ve written before about the economics of cybersecurity. A user’s investment in security protects the user himself; and he has an incentive to…
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Virtual Worlds: Only a Game?
I wrote yesterday about virtual worlds, and the inevitability of government intervention in them. One objection to government intervention is that virtual worlds are only games; and it doesn’t make sense for government to intervene in games. Indeed, many members of virtual worlds want the worlds to be games that operate at some remove from…
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Virtual World, Meet Terrestrial Government
Something remarkable is happening in virtual worlds. These are online virtual “spaces” where you can play a virtual character, and interact with countless other characters in a rich environment. It sounds like a harmless game, but there’s more to it than that. Much more. When you put so many people into a place where they…