Category: Uncategorized
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DRM Textbooks Offered to Princeton Students
There’s a story going around the blogosphere that Princeton is experimenting with DRMed e-textbooks. Here’s an example: Princeton University, intellectual home of Edward Felten and Alex Halderman, has evidently begun to experiment with DRM’d textbooks. According to this post, there are quite a few digital restrictions being managed: Textbook is locked to the computer where…
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Cisco Claims Its Product is a Trade Secret
I wrote Friday about the legal threats by Cisco and ISS against researcher Mike Lynn, relating to Lynn’s presentation at Black Hat about a Cisco security vulnerability. The complaint Cisco and ISS filed is now available online. Jennifer Granick, Lynn’s lawyer, has an interesting narrative of the case (part 1; part 2; part 3; part…
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Entertainment Industry Pretending to Have Won Grokster Case
Most independent analysts agree that the entertainment industry didn’t get what it wanted from the Supreme Court’s Grokster ruling. Things look grim for the Grokster defendants themselves; but what the industry really wanted from the Court was a ruling that a communication technologies that are widely used to infringe should not be allowed to exist,…
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WiFi Freeloading Now a Crime in U.K.
A British man has been fined and given a suspended prison sentence for connecting to a stranger’s WiFi access point without permission, according to a BBC story. There is no indication that he did anything improper while connected; all he did was to park his car in front of a stranger’s house and connect his…
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ISS Caught in the Middle in Cisco Security Flap
The cybersecurity world is buzzing with news about Cisco’s attempt to silence Michael Lynn’s discussion of a serious security flaw in the company’s product. Here’s the chronology, which I have pieced together from news reports (so the obvious caveats apply): Michael Lynn worked for ISS, a company that sells security scanning software. In the course…
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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…