Category: Uncategorized
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Tit for Tat
Recent news stories, picked up all over blogland, reported that Tit-for-Tat has been dethroned as the best strategy in iterated prisoners’ dilemma games. In a computer tournament, a team from Southampton University won with a new strategy, beating the Tit-for-Tat strategy for the first time. Here’s the background. Prisoners’ Dilemma is a game with two…
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Preemptive Blame-Shifting by the E-Voting Industry
The November 2nd election hasn’t even happened yet, and already the e-voting industry is making excuses for the election-day failures of their technology. That’s right – they’re rebutting future reports of future failures. Here’s a sample: Problem Voting machines will not turn on or operate. Explanation Voting machines are not connected to an active power…
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Privacy, Recording, and Deliberately Bad Crypto
One reason for the growing concern about privacy these days is the ever-decreasing cost of storing information. The cost of storing a fixed amount of data seems to be dropping at the Moore’s Law rate, that is, by a factor of two every 18 months, or equivalently a factor of about 100 every decade. When…
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DoJ To Divert Resources to P2P Enforcement
Last week the Department of Justice issued a report on intellectual property enforcement. Public discussion has been slow to develop, since the report seems to be encoded in some variant of the PDF format that stops many people from reading it. (I could read it fine on one of my computers, but ran into an…
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Fast-Forwarding Becomes a Partisan Issue
Remember when I suggested that Republicans might be more prone to copyright sanity than Democrats? Perhaps I was on to something. Consider a recent Senate exchange that was caught by Jason Schultz and Frank Field. Senator John McCain (Republican from Arizona) has placed a block on two copyright-expansion bills, H.R. 2391 and H.R. 4077, because…
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Another Broken Diebold Protocol
Yesterday I wrote about a terribly weak security protocol in the Diebold AccuVote-TS system (at least as it existed in 2002), as reported in a talk by Dan Wallach. That wasn’t the only broken Diebold protocol Dan discussed. Here’s another one which may be even scarier. The Diebold system allows a polling place administrator to…
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Bad Protocol
Dan Wallach from Rice University was here on Monday and gave a talk on e-voting. One of the examples in his talk was interesting enough that I thought I would share it with you, both as an introductory example of how security analysts think, and as an illustration of how badly Diebold botched the design…
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Experimental Use Exception Evaporating?
Doug Tygar points to a front-page article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about a lawsuit that raises troubling questions about researchers’ ability to use patented technologies for experimental purposes. Patent law, which makes it illegal to make or use a patented invention without permission of the patent owner, has an exception for experimental use. The…
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Latest Induce Act Draft Still Buggy
Reportedly the Induce Act has stalled, after the breakdown of negotiations over statutory language. Ernest Miller has the last draft offered by the entertainment industry. (Notice how the entertainment industry labels its draft as the “copyright owners'” proposal. It takes some chutzpah to call your side the “copyright owners” when the largest copyright-owning industry –…
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Business Week on Chilled Researchers
Heather Green at Business Week has a nice new piece, “Commentary: Are the Copyright Wars Chilling Innovation?” Despite the question mark in the title, it’s clear from the piece that innovation is being chilled, especially in the research community. The piece starts out by retelling the story of the legal smackdown threatened against my colleagues…