Category: Uncategorized
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The Supreme Court and Software Patents
I’m very excited that Doug Lichtman, a sharp law professor at UCLA, has decided to take up podcasting. His podcast, Intellectual Property Colloquium, features monthly, in-depth discussions of copyright and patent law. The first installment (mp3) featured a lively discussion between Lichtman and EFF’s inimitable Fred von Lohmann about the Cablevision decision and its implications…
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The (Ironic) Best Way to Make the Bailout Transparent
The next piece of proposed bailout legislation is called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Chris Soghoian, who is covering the issue on his Surveillance State blog at CNET, brought the bill to my attention, particularly a provision requiring that a new web site called Recovery.gov “provide data on relevant economic, financial, grant,…
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CA SoS Bowen sends proposals to EAC
California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has sent a letter to Chair Gineen Beach of the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) outlining three proposals that she thinks will markedly improve the integrity of voting systems in the country. I’ve put a copy of Bowen’s letter here (87kB PDF). Bowen’s three proposals are: Vulnerability Reporting –…
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DRM In Retreat
Last week’s agreement between Apple and the major record companies to eliminate DRM (copy protection) in iTunes songs marks the effective end of DRM for recorded music. The major online music stores are now all DRM-free, and CDs still lack DRM, so consumers who acquire music will now expect it without DRM. That’s a sensible…
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Optical-scan voting extremely accurate in Minnesota
The recount of the 2008 Minnesota Senate race gives us an opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of precinct-count optical-scan voting. Though there have been contentious disputes over which absentee ballot envelopes to open, the core technology for scanning ballots has proved to be extremely accurate. The votes were counted by machine (except for part of…
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Tech Policy Challenges for the Obama Administration
[Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School asked me to write a short essay on information technology challenges facing the Obama Administration, as part of the School’s Inaugural activities. Here is my essay.] Digital technologies can make government more effective, open and transparent, and can make the economy as a whole more flexible and efficient. They can also…
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Wu on Zittrain's Future of the Internet
Related to my previous post about the future of open technologies, Tim Wu has a great review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book. Wu reviews the origins of the 20th century’s great media empires, which steadily consolidated once-fractious markets. He suggests that the Internet likely won’t meet the same fate. My favorite part: In the 2000s, AOL…
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The Perpetual Peril of Open Platforms
Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick did a great post a few weeks back on a theme I’ve written about before: peoples’ tendency to underestimate the robustness of open platforms. Once people have a taste for what that openness allows, stuffing it back into a box is very difficult. Yes, it’s important to remain vigilant, and…
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Satyam and the Inadvertent Web
Satyam is one of the handful of large companies who dominate the IT outsourcing market in India, A week ago today, B. Ramalinga Raju, the company chairman, confessed to a years-long accounting fraud. More than a billion dollars of cash the company claimed to have on hand, and the business success that putatively generated those…
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Debugging the Zune Blackout
On December 31, some models of the Zune, Microsoft’s portable music player, went dark. The devices were unusable until the following day. Failures like this are sometimes caused by complex chains of mishaps, but this particular one is due to a single programming error that is reasonably easy to understand. Let’s take a look. Here…