Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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Pro-Competition Ruling in Lexmark Case
Yesterday the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Lexmark v. Static Control. The Court said, in effect, that Lexmark could not leverage copyright and DMCA claims to keep a competitor from making toner cartridges that work with Lexmark printers. This reversed a lower court decision. [Backstory: Lexmark-brand toner cartridges contain a short computer program…
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Another E-Voting Glitch: Miscalibrated Touchscreens
Voters casting early ballots in New Mexico report that the state’s touchscreen voting machines sometimes record a vote for the wrong candidate, according to a Jim Ludwick story in the Albuquerque Journal. (Link via DocBug) [Kim Griffith] went to Valle Del Norte Community Center in Albuquerque, planning to vote for John Kerry. “I pushed his…
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LAMP and Regulatory Arbitrage
Today, MIT’s LAMP system goes back on line, with a new design. LAMP (“Library Access to Music Project”) streams music to the MIT campus via the campus cable TV system. Any student can connect to LAMP’s website and choose a sequence of songs. The chosen songs are then scheduled for playing on one of sixteen…