CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Category: Uncategorized

  • Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Decision Architectures

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    Tim Wu has an interesting new draft paper on how public policy in areas like intellectual property affects which innovations are pursued. It’s often hard to tell in advance which innovations will succeed. Organizational economists distinguish centralized decision structures, in which one party decides whether to proceed with a proposed innovation, from decentralized structures, in…

  • MacIntel: It's Not About DRM

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    The big tech news today is that Apple will start using Intel microprocessors (the same brand used in PCs) in its Macintosh computers, starting next year. Some have speculated that this might be motivated by DRM. The theory is that Apple wants the anticopying features that will be built into the hardware of future Intel…

  • Book Club: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

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    [Index of all book club postings] [RSS feed (book club postings)] [RSS feed (book club comments, but not postings)] Freedom to Tinker is hosting an online book club discussion of Lawrence Lessig’s book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig has created a wiki (an online collaborative space) with the text of the book, and…

  • Virtually Unprotected

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    Today’s New York Times has a strongly worded editorial saying the U.S. is vulnerable to a devastating cyberattack, and national action is required. We are indeed vulnerable to cyberattack, but this may not be our most serious unaddressed vulnerability. Is the threat of cyberattack more serious than, say, the threat of a physical attack on…

  • Book Club

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    I’m thinking about running a Freedom to Tinker book club. I would choose a book and invite readers to read it along with me, one chapter per week. I would post a reaction to each chapter (or I would ask another reader to do so), and a discussion would follow in the comments section. This…

  • Dissecting the Witty Worm

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    A clever new paper by Abhishek Kumar, Vern Paxson, and Nick Weaver analyzes the Witty Worm, which infected computers running certain security software in March 2004. By analyzing the spray of random packets Witty sent around the Internet, they managed to learn a huge amount about Witty’s spread, including exactly where the virus was injected…

  • On a New Server

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    This site is on the new server now, using WordPress. Please let me know, in the comments, if you see any problems.

  • About This Site

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    Ed Felten says: Hi, I’m Ed Felten. In my day job, I’m a Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and Director of Princeton’s Center for InfoTech Policy. Alex Halderman says: Hi, I’m J. Alex Halderman. In my afternoon and night job, I’m a graduate student in Computer Science at Princeton University.…

  • BitTorrent Search

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    BitTorrent.com released a new search facility yesterday, making it slightly easier to find torrent files on the Net. This is an odd strategic move by BitTorrent.com – it doesn’t help the company’s customers much, but mostly just muddles the company’s public messaging. [Backstory about BitTorrent: The BitTorrent technology allows efficient Internet distribution of large files…

  • A Land Without Music

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    Here’s a story I heard recently from an anonymous source. Based on the source’s identity and some of the details of the story, I believe it to be true. I have omitted some details here, to protect the source. A well-known company, running a massive multi-player virtual world, was considering adding a new space to…