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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Lately I’ve been reading a biography of Thomas Edison, one of history’s great tinkerers. (I recommend the book: Edison by Matthew Josephson.) I’m amazed at how little the basic nature…
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Fritz's Hit List #23
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: musical car horns. These automobile horns play prerecorded digital sounds, so they qualify for regulation as “digital media devices” under the Hollings CBDTPA. If the…
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A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come?
On Monday I attended a workshop to discuss compulsory licensing of music. A compulsory license might work like this: a small “tax” is added to the cost of Internet connections…
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Fritz's Hit List #22
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: the Athena Mars Exploration Rovers. These machines, which are designed to explore the surface of the planet Mars, record and transmit digital video and images,…
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NYT Article on Fritz's Hit List
Today’s New York Times has an article (on page 3 of the Business section), by David F. Gallagher, about Fritz’s Hit List. I love the title: “Robotic Dogs and Singing…
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Fritz's Hit List #21
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: digital sewing machines. These machines replay digitally prerecorded stitch sequences to make complex pictures and patterns, so they qualify for regulation as “digital media devices”…
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Paper on Copy-Protected CDs
Alex Halderman, a senior here at Princeton, has written a very interesting paper entitled “Evaluating New Copy-Prevention Techniques for Audio CDs.” Here is the paper’s abstract: Several major record labels…
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More on the Almost-General-Purpose Language
Seth Finkelstein and Eric Albert criticize my claim that the fallacy of the almost-general-purpose computer can best be illustrated by analogy to an almost-general-purpose spoken language. They make some good…
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Fritz's Hit List #20
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: audio key chains (like this one). These key chains play a prerecorded audio track, which presumably is stored in digital form, so they qualify for…
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Schoen: Palladium Can Have an "Owner Override"
Seth Schoen argues that “trusted systems” like Palladium can have a sort of manual override that allows the owner to get all of the data on a machine, even if…