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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TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications.…
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MPAA Sues BitTorrent Trackers
The MPAA has announced lawsuits against the operators of P2P index servers, such as BitTorrent trackers, according to a Wired News story by Xeni Jardin. A BitTorrent tracker keeps track…
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Should the U.S. Allow Region Coding?
On Friday I wrote about DVD region coding, which allows the manufacture of DVDs that (in theory) can only be played in certain regions of the world. U.S. public policy,…
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Inside the DVD Procedural Specifications
As I noted yesterday, part of the license that DVD makers have to sign is <a href="As I noted yesterday, part of the license that DVD makers have to sign…
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DVD-CCA Sues to Suppress Kaleidescape Product
DVD-CCA, the outfit that licenses the lame DVD anti-copying technology, has sued Kaleidescape, a maker of home video servers, according a news.com story by John Borland: [DVD-CCA is suing Kaleidescape.]…
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Few Sci/Tech Books in OCLC Top 1000
Recently OCLC, a large library consortium, compiled a list of the top 1000 books, measured by the number of copies held by member libraries. In light of the earlier discussion…
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Snocap Tries Authorized P2P
Snocap, a company involving Napster founder Shawn Fanning, is trying to enable new peer-to-peer networks that identify copyrighted works and charge users for receiving them, according to Jeff Leeds’ story…
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Gator's Egregious EULA
Ben Edelman offers a nice dissection of the latest End User License Agreement (EULA) from Gator. It has to be one of the worst EULAs ever written. Below are some…
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DVD Replacement Still Insecure
There’s a budding format war in the movie industry, over which video medium will replace the DVD. The candidates are called HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. For some reason, HD-DVD advocates are…
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Lycos Attacks Alleged Spammers
Lycos Europe is distributing a screen saver that launches denial of service attacks on the websites of suspected spammers, according to a Craig Morris story at Heise Online. The screen…