Category: Uncategorized
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New Study on Filesharing Effect (Part 2)
Continuing yesterday’s discussion of the new Rob/Waldfogel filesharing study, let’s look at the possible effect of authorized downloading services. As we saw yesterday, one of the main findings of the study is that people derive lots of benefit (about $45 annually per capita for the study’s sample population) from downloading songs that they don’t value…
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New Study on Filesharing Effects
There’s a new study out, by Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel, on the effect of filesharing on music sales. The news headlines will say that the study shows that filesharing hurts CD sales (as the BBC story does); but the full results are more complicated. The study relied on surveys of college students: a preliminary…
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Lack of Paper Trail Ruins North Carolina Election
Just in case you thought that lawsuits about pregnant chads were the worst possible election outcome, here’s a story about the consequences of e-voting without a proper paper trail. A bug in e-voting system software caused about 13% of the votes cast in Carteret County, North Carolina in last week’s election to be lost irretrievably,…
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How BitTorrent Changes the P2P Fight
The big copyright owners have gotten pretty sophisticated about monitoring P2P applications to gather evidence for lawsuits. But now P2P traffic seems to be shifting to the BitTorrent system, which works differently from other P2P systems. This will affect the copyright owners’ monitoring strategy in some interesting ways. Most P2P systems allow users to choose…
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Needed: Careful E-Voting Correlation Study
Tuesday’s election created lots of data about voting patterns in places that used different voting technologies. Various people have done exploratory data analysis, to see how jurisdictions that used e-voting might differ from those that did not. See, for example, the analysis cited in Joe Hall’s entry over at evoting-experts.com. As a commenter on Joe’s…
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MPAA To Sue Invididuals
The Motion Picture Association of America plans to file copyright infringement lawsuits against about 230 individuals today, according to a New York Times story by Laura M. Holson. Rumor has it that studio heads had long wanted to do this but former MPAA chief Jack Valenti had refused to go along with it. Now that…
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Election Season
Until the election is decided, I’ll be blogging less on this site, and more on evoting-experts.com. U.S. readers: please vote tomorrow!
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New EVoting-Experts Group Blog
evoting-experts.com is a new group blog devoted to e-voting issues. Members include leading experts on the technology, including David Dill, Ed Felten, Joe Hall, Avi Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and Dan Wallach (with more to come, we hope). The site’s goal is to provide one-stop shopping for e-voting news and analysis, to the public and the…
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The Big-Head Principle
Over the next few days, Americans will be asking themselves which candidate has what it takes to be president, or at least which one has what it takes to win the election. To answer this question, we must first determine exactly what it does take. Based on personal observation, I think I may know. Bill…
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CallerID and Bad Authentication
A new web service allows anybody to make phone calls with forged CallerID (for a fee), according to a Kevin Poulsen story at SecurityFocus. (Another such service had been open briefly a few months ago.) This isn’t surprising, given the known insecurity of the CallerID system, which trusts the system where a call originates to…