Research and commentary on digital technologies in public life
I wrote previously about the lawsuit filed by printer maker Lexmark against Static Control, a maker of toner cartridge remanufacturing parts. Lexmark claims that Static Control is violating the DMCA by making toner cartridges that do what is necessary to work in Lexmark printers.
The Copyright Office has allowed Static Control to file a late request for a DMCA exemption. Here is the request.
This one leaves me speechless.
According to a fascinating story over at ComputerWorld, tech journalist Brian McWilliams has admitted to running a hoax website that claimed to be the site of a scary real-world terrorist group. He even arranged to have the fake site “defaced” by (fictitious) anti-terrorist hackers, and he created a hoax message in which the group claimed “credit” for the recent Slammer/Sapphire worm attack. McWilliams claims to have gotten several emails from people wanting to join the terrorist group, and to have passed some of them on to the FBI.
[Link credit: Declan McCullagh’s Politech.]
If you’re interested in technology regulation, don’t miss Derek Slater’s interview with MPAA chief Jack Valenti, in Harvard Political Review. Slater asks only four questions about copyright and technology, but in answering those four short questions Valenti manages to display amazing ignorance of both copyright law and technology.
Don’t believe me? Here is Valenti on copyright law:
What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There’s nothing in law.
(Somebody should tell him about this law.) Now on technology:
In the digital world, we don’t need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out.
(Somebody should tell him that it is standard practice to back up all digital data.)
Nobody expects a lobbyist to be up on the esoteric details of law or technology. But is it too much to ask that he have at least a rudimentary understanding of the law he wants to change, and of the field he wants to regulate? Why do our representatives listen to this guy?
[Thanks to Copyfight and Ernie the Attorney for links.]
My previous postings on the program vs. data distinction have drawn quite a few comments. (To see them, click the “followups” links on my previous postings.) I’m going to let the conversation settle a bit before commenting again. But just to stir things up, here is another challenging case.
Some programs are never meant to be executed. They do instruct a computer to do something, but their author never intends them to be executed, and they never are executed. Why would somebody write a program that they know will never be executed? Let me explain.
Suppose you are studying mathematical logic, and you want to know whether a particular assertion can be proven from some set of initial axioms. It turns out that there is a deep equivalence between mathematical logic and programming languages, such that a given statement is provable in a logic if and only if a computer program of a certain type exists. It follows that you can show that a statement is provable by demonstrating the existence of a certain type of program. You don’t have to run the program; you just have to show that it is a valid program according to the rules of a particular programming language.
This isn’t just a theoretical parlor trick. Researchers often use this equivalence to show the provability of logical statements by exhibiting the existence of programs. I myself have done this and have published two papers about it. In the course of doing this, I wrote lots of program code, but never once did I run any of it.
If you believe that the author’s intent is what makes something a program, then the code I wrote is not a program, since I never meant it to control a computer (and it never did). If, on the other hand, you believe that program-ness is inherent in the potential capability of the object itself, then my code is a program.
A new paper by well-regarded networking researchers analyzes the spread of the recent Slammer/Sapphire worm. The worm spread at astonishing speed, doubling the number of infected hosts every 8.5 seconds, and infecting 90% of the susceptible machines on the Net within ten minutes. Researchers had predicted that such fast-spreading worms could exist, but this is the first one seen in the wild.
The clear lesson is that a network attack can cause very widespread damage before human network operators can react. Only a widely implemented, automated shutdown procedure can hope to slam the door on a worm like this. Fortunately, Slammer/Sapphire did not carry a malicious payload. The next time we may not be so fortunate.
[Thanks to Sue Ferrara for the link.]
