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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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…
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Give Us Analog. No Wait, We Meant Digital.
Remember when Hollywood wanted to ban digital outputs on media devices? The rationale was that digital outputs were uniquely copyable. Here’s Jack Valenti addressing a congressional hearing back in April:…
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White House Cybersecurity Czar Urges DMCA Reform
Today’s Boston Globe reports, in an article by Hiawatha Bray, on comments made at a “town meeting” yesterday by Richard Clarke, the head of the White House’s Office of Cybersecurity:…
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Fritz's Hit List #19
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: audio greeting cards. Greeting cards of this type either play a prerecorded audio track, or record an audio track for later playback. Because the recorded…