Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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Cost Tradeoffs of P2P
On Thursday, I jumped in to a bloggic discussion of the tradeoffs between centrally-controlled and peer-to-peer design strategies in distributed systems. (See posts by Randy Picker (with comments from Tim Wu and others), Lior Strahilevitz, me, and Randy Picker again.) We’ve agreed, I think, that large-scale online services will be designed as distributed systems, and…
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"Centralized" Sites Not So Centralized After All
There’s an conversation among Randy Picker, Tim Wu, and Lior Strahilevitz over the U. Chicago Law School Blog about the relative merits of centralized and peer-to-peer designs for file distribution. (Picker post with Wu comments; Strahilevitz post) Picker started the discussion by noting that photo sharing sites like Flickr use a centralized design, rather than…
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Cellphone Denial of Service
A new paper by Enck, Traynor, McDaniel, and La Porta argues that cellphone networks that support SMS, a technology for sending short text messages to phones, are subject to denial of service attacks. The researchers claim that a clever person with a fast home broadband connection could potentially block cell phone calling in Manhattan or…
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eDonkey Seeks Record Industry Deal
Derek Slater points to last week’s Senate hearing testimony by Sam Yagan, President of MetaMachine, the distributor of the popular eDonkey peer-to-peer file sharing software. The hearing’s topic was “Protecting Copyright and Innovation in a Post-Grokster World”. Had the Supreme Court drawn a clearer legal line in its Grokster decision, we wouldn’t have needed such…
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Net Governance Debate Heats Up
European countries surprised the U.S. Wednesday by suggesting that an international body rather than the U.S. government should have ultimate control over certain Internet functions. According to Tom Wright’s story in the International Herald Tribune, The United States lost its only ally [at the U.N.’s World Summit on the Information Society] late Wednesday when the…