Category: Uncategorized
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BSA To Ask For Expansion of ISP Liability
The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a software industry group, will ask Congress to expand the liability of ISPs for infringing traffic that goes across their networks, according to a Washington Post story by Jonathan Krim. The campaign to modify the law is part of a broader effort by the BSA to address a variety of…
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Predictions for 2005
Here is my list of twelve predictions for 2005. (1) DRM technology, especially on PCs, will be seen increasingly as a security and privacy risk to end users. (2) Vonage and other leading VoIP vendors will start to act like incumbents, welcoming regulation of their industry sector. (3) Internet Explorer will face increasing competitive pressure…
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2004 Predictions Scorecard
A year ago, I offered seven predictions for 2004. Today, as penance for sins committed in 2004, it’s my duty to exhume these predictions and compare them to reality. (1) Some public figure will be severely embarrassed by an image taken by somebody else’s picture-phone or an audio stream captured by somebody else’s pocket audio…
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Recording Industry Publishing Infected P2P Files?
The recording industry may be publishing spyware-infested copies of their songs on P2P networks, according to a PC World story by Andrew Brandt and Eric Dahl. The files are encoded in a Microsoft file format. When the user plays such a file, the user’s browser is forced to visit a URL contained in the file.…
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Clip Blog
I now have a clip blog, at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/clips. There I’ll post quick links to things that I find interesting, with little or no commentary.
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When Is a "Network" Not a Network?
Last week, in response to the MPAA lawsuits against BitTorrent trackers, I wrote that it’s impossible to sue BitTorrent itself, because it is nothing but a communications protocol. Michael Madison was skeptical, which was a fair response given what little I had written on the subject. Let me say a bit more, to clarify. Opponents…
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P2P in 15 Lines of Code
TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless. For more…
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MPAA Sues BitTorrent Trackers
The MPAA has announced lawsuits against the operators of P2P index servers, such as BitTorrent trackers, according to a Wired News story by Xeni Jardin. A BitTorrent tracker keeps track of who is downloading and/or uploading a particular file, and makes this information available to others who want to find the file. The suits will…
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Should the U.S. Allow Region Coding?
On Friday I wrote about DVD region coding, which allows the manufacture of DVDs that (in theory) can only be played in certain regions of the world. U.S. public policy, in the form of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), plays an important role in shoring up the region coding mechanism. Is this good public…