Category: Uncategorized
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U.S. Computer Science Malaise
There’s a debate going on now among U.S. computer science researchers and educators, about whether the U.S. as a nation is serious about maintaining its lead in computer science. We have been the envy of the world, drawing most of the worlds’ best and brightest in the field to our country, and laying the foundations…
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Privacy, Price Discrimination, and Identification
Recently it was reported that Disney World is fingerprinting its customers. This raised obvious privacy concerns. People wondered why Disney would need that information, and what they were going to do with it. As Eric Rescorla noted, the answer is almost surely price discrimination. Disney sells multi-day tickets at a discount. They don’t want people…
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Thee and Ay
It’s not often that you learn something about yourself from a stranger’s blog. But that’s what happened to me on Friday. I was sifting through a list of new links to this blog (thanks to Technorati), and I found an entry on a blog called Serendipity, about the way I pronounce the word “the”. It…
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Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Plan
Despite J.K. Rowling’s decision not to offer the new Harry Potter book in e-book format, it took less than a day for fans to scan the book and assemble an unauthorized electronic version, which is reportedly circulating on the Internet. If Rowling thought that her decision against e-book release would prevent infringement, then she needs…
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Who'll Stop the Spam-Bots?
The FTC has initiated Operation Spam Zombies, a program that asks ISPs to work harder to detect and isolate spam-bots on their customers’ computers. Randy Picker has a good discussion of this. A bot is a malicious, long-lived software agent that sits on a computer and carries out commands at the behest of a remote…
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What is Spyware?
Recently the Anti-Spyware Coalition released a document defining spyware and related terms. This is an impressive-sounding group, convened by CDT and including companies like HP, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Here is their central definition: Spyware and Other Potentially Unwanted Technologies Technologies implemented in ways that impair users’ control over: Material changes that affect their user experience,…
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HD-DVD Requires Digital Imprimatur
Last week I wrote about the antitrust issues raised by the use of encryption to “protect” content. Here’s a concrete example. HD-DVD, one of the two candidates for the next-gen DVD format, uses a “content protection” technology called AACS. And AACS, it turns out, requires a digital imprimatur on any content before it can be…
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Controlling Software Updates
Randy Picker questions part of the computer science professors’ Grokster brief (of which I was a co-signer), in which we wrote: Even assuming that Respondents have the right and ability to deliver such software to end users, there can be no way to ensure that software updates are installed, and stay installed. End users ultimately…
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Michigan Email Registry as a Tax on Bulk Emailers
I wrote on Friday about the new registry of kids’ email addresses being set up by the state of Michigan. I wasn’t impressed. A commenter pointed out an important fact I missed: emailers have to pay a fee of $0.007 to screen each address against the list. (One of the occupational hazards of blogging is…
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Encryption and Copying
Last week I criticized Richard Posner for saying that labeling content and adding filtering to P2P apps would do much to reduce infringement on P2P net. In responding to comments, Judge Posner unfortunately makes a very similar mistake: Several pointed out correctly that tags on software files, indicating that the file is copyrighted, can probably…