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 yesterday about virtual worlds, and the inevitability of government intervention in them. One objection to government intervention is that virtual worlds are only games; and it doesn’t make…
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Virtual World, Meet Terrestrial Government
Something remarkable is happening in virtual worlds. These are online virtual “spaces” where you can play a virtual character, and interact with countless other characters in a rich environment. It…
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Cost Tradeoffs of P2P
On Thursday, I jumped in to a bloggic discussion of the tradeoffs between centrally-controlled and peer-to-peer design strategies in distributed systems. (See posts by Randy Picker (with comments from Tim…
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"Centralized" Sites Not So Centralized After All
There’s an conversation among Randy Picker, Tim Wu, and Lior Strahilevitz over the U. Chicago Law School Blog about the relative merits of centralized and peer-to-peer designs for file distribution.…
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Cellphone Denial of Service
A new paper by Enck, Traynor, McDaniel, and La Porta argues that cellphone networks that support SMS, a technology for sending short text messages to phones, are subject to denial…
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eDonkey Seeks Record Industry Deal
Derek Slater points to last week’s Senate hearing testimony by Sam Yagan, President of MetaMachine, the distributor of the popular eDonkey peer-to-peer file sharing software. The hearing’s topic was “Protecting…
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Net Governance Debate Heats Up
European countries surprised the U.S. Wednesday by suggesting that an international body rather than the U.S. government should have ultimate control over certain Internet functions. According to Tom Wright’s story…
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The Pizzaright Principle
Lately, lots of bogus arguments for copyright expansion have been floating around. A handy detector for bogus arguments is the Pizzaright Principle. Pizzaright – the exclusive right to sell pizza…
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Secure Flight: Shifting Goals, Vague Plan
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) released Friday a previously confidential report by the Secure Flight Working Group (SFWG), an independent expert committee on which I served. The committee’s charter was…
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Google Print, Damages and Incentives
There’s been lots of discussion online of this week’s lawsuit filed against Google by a group of authors, over the Google Print project. Google Print is scanning in books from…