CITP Blog is hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.
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I wrote in April about the over-the-top marketing claims of the “anti-piracy” company SafeMedia. (See Is SafeMedia a Parody?) The company’s marketing materials claim that its comically named product, “Clouseau,”…
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Email Protected by 4th Amendment, Court Says
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday, in Warshak v. U.S., that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email, so that the government needs a search…
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Chinese Gold Farmers: Work or Fun?
Julian Dibbell had an interesting article in yesterday’s NYT, profiling several Chinese gold farmers, who make their living playing the massive multiplayer game World of Warcraft (WoW) and accumulating virtual…
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All the Interested Parties? Not Quite.
Here’s a quick quiz to detect whether you’re stuck in Washington groupthink. There’s a patent reform bill under consideration in Congress. According to a blog entry by Andrew Noyes at…
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Staying Off the Regulatory Radar
I just returned from a tech policy conference. It was off the record so I can’t tell you about what was said. But I can tell you that it got…
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Apple's File Labeling: An Effective Anticopying Tool?
Recently it was revealed that Apple’s new DRM-free iTunes tracks come with the buyer’s name encoded in their headers. Randy Picker suggested that this might be designed to deter copying…
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Why So Much Attention to "What's a Website?" Judge?
One of the benefits of talking to the press is that reporters often ask thought-provoking questions. Recently Noam Cohen, a New York Times columnist, called and asked me why the…
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The Slingbox Pro: Information Leakage and Variable Bitrate (VBR) Fingerprints
[Today’s guest blogger is Yoshi Kohno, a Computer Science prof at University of Washington who has done interesting work on security and privacy topics including e-voting. – Ed] If you…
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Finnish Court: Okay to Circumvent DVD DRM
A court in Finland ruled last week that it is not a violation of that nation’s anticircumvention law to circumvent CSS, the copy protection system in DVDs. Mikko Välimäki, one…
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Newsweek Ranks Schools; Monkey High Still Tops
Newsweek has once again issued its list of America’s Best High Schools. They’re using the same goofy formula as before: the number of students from a school who show up…