Tag: Technology and Freedom
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Swarthmore Students Re-Publish Diebold Memos
A group of Swarthmore students has published a damning series of internal memos from electronic-voting vendor Diebold. The memos appear to document cavalier treatment of security issues by Diebold, and the use of non-certified software in real elections. Diebold, claiming that the students are infringing copyright, has sent a series of DMCA takedown letters to…
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SunnComm's Latest
SunnComm is now taking yet another position regarding Alex Halderman’s paper – that the paper is just “political activism masquerading as research”. (The quote comes from SunnComm president Peter Jacobs, responding to a question from Seth Finkelstein.) Jacobs had expressed the same sentiment earlier, on an investor discussion board, in this vitriolic message, which he…
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SunnComm Says It Won't Sue Halderman
SunnComm, which had previously said it planned to sue Alex Halderman for publishing a critique of SunnComm’s CD anti-copying technology, has now backed off. According to Josh Brodie’s story in today’s Daily Princetonian, SunnComm president Peter Jacobs has now said the company has changed its mind and will not sue. SunnComm is to be commended…
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SunnComm Responds
Hiawatha Bray’s story in today’s Boston Globe reports on SunnComm’s response to Alex Halderman’s dissection of SunnComm’s CD copy-protection technology. ”There’s nothing in his report that’s surprising,” said SunnComm president Bill Whitmore. ”There’s nothing in the report that I’m concerned about.” Whitmore said his company’s system is simply supposed to give honest music lovers a…
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Story Time
In a speech today, John Fictitious, president of the Hospital Association of America, expressed his industry’s disappointment at the continuing prevalence of cancer in America. “Our industry stands ready to deploy a cure, but the doctors and drug companies have been unwilling to sit down at the bargaining table to work out a mutually agreeable…
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Senate Commerce Testimony: Post-Mortem
Today I testified at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. The issue under discussion was whether (or how) the government should require the inclusion of DRM (anti-copying) technology in digital TV equipment. Here is my written testimony. If you haven’t been to such a hearing, you might be surprised at some of what happens. For one…
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Senate Testimony
I’ll be testifying tomorrow morning at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on “Consumer Privacy and Government Technology Mandates in the Digital Media Marketplace.” The hearing is really about two topics: the DMCA subpoena process that allows copyright owners to learn the identities of Internet users (“Consumer Privacy”), and the impact of regulations that would require…
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P2P Porn
Yesterday’s New York Times reported that recording industry lobbyists are shocked, shocked to find porn on popular peer-to-peer networks. Naturally, they think P2P should be heavily regulated as a result. Somebody should send them a copy of Michael Kinsley’s classic Slate editorial on the most dangerous of all media: paper.
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Hacking, by Subpoena
James Grimmelmann at LawMeme explains a recent opinion by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, holding that a party that used an obviously improper subpoena to get information from a computer can be sued for breaking into that computer. If you think about this, it makes some sense, if the subpoena was used to defeat…
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The Scopes Trial, Revisited
This week, the Economist ran an odd piece comparing the SCO/IBM dispute to the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” SCO, for anyone who has never heard of the company, is pronounced “skoh”, as in Scopes. Indeed “the SCO case” of 2003 sounds increasingly like the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, which pitted religious fundamentalists against progressives…