Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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The Pizzaright Principle
Lately, lots of bogus arguments for copyright expansion have been floating around. A handy detector for bogus arguments is the Pizzaright Principle. Pizzaright – the exclusive right to sell pizza – is a new kind of intellectual property right. Pizzaright law, if adopted, would make it illegal to make or serve a pizza without a…
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Secure Flight: Shifting Goals, Vague Plan
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) released Friday a previously confidential report by the Secure Flight Working Group (SFWG), an independent expert committee on which I served. The committee’s charter was to study the privacy implications of the Secure Flight program. The final report is critical of TSA’s management of Secure Flight. (Besides me, the committee…
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Google Print, Damages and Incentives
There’s been lots of discussion online of this week’s lawsuit filed against Google by a group of authors, over the Google Print project. Google Print is scanning in books from four large libraries, indexing the books’ contents, and letting people do Google-style searches on the books’ contents. Search results show short snippets from the books,…
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Who Is An ISP?
There’s talk in Washington about a major new telecommunications bill, to update the Telecom Act of 1996. A discussion draft of the bill is floating around. The bill defines three types of services: Internet service (called “Broadband Internet Transmission Service” or BITS for short); VoIP; and broadband television. It lays down specific regulations for each…
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Movie Studios Form DRM Lab
Hollywood argues – or at least strongly implies – that technology companies could stop copyright infringement if they wanted to, but have chosen not to do so. I have often wondered whether Hollywood really believes this, or whether the claim is just a ploy to gain political advantage. Such a ploy might be very effective…