Tag: Technology and Freedom
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Ed Talks in SANE
Today, I gave a keynote at the SANE (System Administration and Network Engineering) conference, in Delft, the Netherlands. SANE has an interesting group of attendees, mostly high-end system and network jockeys, and people who like to hang around with them. At the request of some attendees, I am providing a PDF of my slides, with…
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Happy Endings
Cameron Wilson at the USACM Policy Blog writes about a Cato Institute event about copyright policy, which was held Wednesday. The panel on the DMCA was especially interesting. (audio download; audio stream; video stream) Tim Lee, author of the recent Cato paper on the ill effects of the DMCA, spoke first. The second speaker was…
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HDCP: Why So Weak?
Today I want to wrap up (I think) the discussion on security weaknesses in HDCP, the encryption scheme used for sending very high-def video from a device like a next-gen DVD player to a TV monitor. I wrote previously (1, 2, 3) about how HDCP will inevitably fail – catastrophically – when somebody manages to…
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HDCP Could Have Been Better
I wrote Friday about weaknesses in the HDCP handshake protocol that is being used to set up encryption of very high-def TV content that is in transit from devices like next-gen DVD players to television monitors. This was not news to those who follow the area. The ideas in my post came from a 2001…
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Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes
I wrote yesterday about the HDCP/HDMI technology that Hollywood wants to use to restrict the availability of very high-def TV content. Today I want to go under the hood, explaining how the key part of HDCP, the handshake, works. I’ll leave out some mathematical niceties to simplify the explanation; full details are in a 2001…
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HDMI and Output Control
Tim Lee at Tech Liberation Front points out an interesting aspect of the new MovieBeam device – it offers its highest-resolution output only to video displays that use the HDMI format. (MovieBeam is a $200 box you buy that lets you buy 24-hour access to recent movies. There is a rotating menu of movies. Currently…
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Understanding the Newts
Recently I’ve been trying to figure out the politics of technology policy. There seem to be regularly drawn battle lines in Congress, but for the most part tech policy doesn’t play out as a Republican vs. Democratic or liberal vs. conservative conflict. Henry Farrell, in a recent post at Crooked Timber, put his finger on…
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Guns vs. Random Bits
Last week Tim Wu gave an interesting lecture here at Princeton – the first in our infotech policy lecture series – entitled “Who Controls the Internet?”, based on his recent book of the same title, co-authored with Jack Goldsmith. In the talk, Tim argued that national governments will have a larger role than most people…
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Conscientious Objection in P2P
One argument made against using P2P systems like Grokster was that by using them you might participate in the distribution of bad content such as infringing files, hate speech, or child porn. If you use the Web to distribute or read content, you play no part in distributing anything you find objectionable – you only…
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Bernard Lang Reports on the Proposed French DRM Law
[Bernard Lang, a prominent French computer scientist and infotech policy commentator, sent me an interesting message about the much-discussed legislative developments in France. It includes the first English translation I have seen of the proposed French law mandating open access to DRM technologies. He has graciously given me permission to post his message here, with…