Category: Uncategorized
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Conservative Group Takes Conservative Position on Induce Act
The American Conservative Union, an influential right-wing group, has announced its opposition to the Induce Act, and is running ads criticizing those Republicans who support the Act. This should not be surprising, for opposition to the Act is a natural position for true conservatives, who oppose government regulation of technology products and support a competitive…
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The Least Objectionable Content Labeling System
Today I’ll wrap up Vice Week here at Freedom to Tinker with an entry on porn labeling. On Monday I agreed with the conventional wisdom that online porn regulation is a mess. On Tuesday I wrote about what my wife and I do in our home to control underage access to inappropriate material. Today, I’ll…
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Bots Play Backgammon Too
Responding to my entry yesterday about pokerbots, Jordan Lampe emails a report from the world of backgammon. Backgammon bots play at least as well as the best human players, and backgammon is often played for money, so the temptation to use bots in online play is definitely there. Most people seem to be wary of…
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Online Poker and Unenforceable Rules
Computerized “bots” may be common in online poker games according to a Mike Brunker story at MSNBC.com. I have my doubts about the prevalence today of skillful, fully automated pokerbots, but there is an interesting story here nonetheless. Most online casinos ban bots, but there is really no way to enforce such a rule. Already,…
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Voluntary Filtering Works for Us
It’s day two of porn week here at Freedom to Tinker, and time to talk about the tools parents have to limit what their kids see. As a parent, I have not only an opinion, but also an actual household policy (set jointly with my wife, of course) on this topic. Like most parents, we…
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Online Porn Issue Not Going Away
Adam Thierer at Technology Liberation Front offers a long and interesting discussion of the online porn wars, in the form of a review of two articles by Jeffrey Rosen and Larry Lessig. I’ve been meaning to write about online porn regulation for a while, and Thierer’s post seems like a good excuse to address that…
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Bike Lock Fiasco
Kryptonite may stymie Superman, but apparently it’s not much of a barrier to bike thieves. Many press reports (e.g., Wired News, New York Times, Boston Globe) say that the supposedly super-strong Kryptonite bike locks can be opened by jamming the empty barrel of a Bic ballpoint pen into the lock and turning clockwise. Understandably, this…
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DRM and the Market
In light of yesterday’s entry on DRM and competition, and the ensuing comment thread, it’s interesting to look at last week’s action by TiVo and ReplayTV to limit their customers’ use of pay-per-view content that the customers have recorded. If customers buy access to pay-per-view content, and record that content on their TiVo or ReplayTV…
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Self-Help for Consumers
Braden Cox at Technology Liberation Front writes about a law school symposium on “The Economics of Self-Help and Self-Defense in Cyberspace”. Near the end of an interesting discussion, Cox says this: The conference ended with Dan Burk at Univ of Minnesota Law School giving a lefty analysis for how DRM will be mostly bad for…
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Security by Obscurity
Adam Shostack points to a new paper by Peter Swire, entitled “A Model for When Disclosure Helps Security”. How, Swire asks, can we reconcile the pro-disclosure “no security by obscurity” stance of crypto weenies with the pro-secrecy, “loose lips sink ships” attitude of the military? Surely both communities understand their own problems; yet they come…