Applied Miscellany

Rik Farrow maintains an archive of the pre-copy-edited versions of his (and those co-authored by Richard Power) Network Defense articles for Network Magazine from July 1997 to April 2004. As a collection, they represent an interesting snapshot of history of network security.

Susan Crawford gave a talk at Princeton a couple of weeks ago about “Two views of the Future” of the Internet. I hope to someday transcribe my notes into a post. In the meantime, I thought I’d give a plug for OneWebDay. Just as Earth Day (April 22 of each year) is a time for [...]

It is becoming increasingly difficult to protect one’s personal data these days. The threat, of course, is that the more complete a profile someone has on you, the greater chance that the information can be used against you for everything from unwanted solicitations to identity theft. Computers are very good at combining information from multiple [...]

From Risks Digest 24.18 (which obtained the information from Slashdot): An anonymous reader writes “The New Jersey legislature is considering a bill [link] that would require operators of public forums to collect users’ legal names and addresses, and effectively disallow anonymous speech on online forums. This raises some serious issues, such as to what extent [...]

In the article, Senate Approves Curbs on Some Patriot Act Powers, The New York Times reports: If Mr. Feingold spoke for the bill’s critics, Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, offered another perspective in support of the antiterrorism measure: “Civil liberties do not mean much when you are dead.” Had he been around in 1775, [...]

I hadn’t heard the term Penguinistas before and it made me chuckle. Here’s the context from LinuxDevices.com: Another defenseless gadget has fallen prey to the relentless march of the Penguinistas. Tim Riker’s eLinux.org [link] website has published extensive, detailed instructions for creating a cartridge that can boot any unmodified Mattel JuiceBox into a Linux-based environment.

The EFF reports: As part of the on-going DMCA rule-making proceedings, the RIAA and other copyright industry associations submitted a filing that included this gem as part of their argument that space-shifting and format-shifting do not count as noninfringing uses, even when you are talking about making copies of your own CDs: “Nor does the [...]

The other day, I attended a talk titled, “The Future of Music and the 5¢ Solution — How artists and consumers can reclaim ownership of music,” by Daniel Levitin, a professor in the psychology department of McGill University, who has had an impressive career in the music/recording industry. The basic idea behind the talk was [...]

Referring to a Doctor Fun cartoon in which a man objects to an RFID implant until he learns that the implant is also a cellphone, digital camera, and an MP3 player, Bruce Schneier writes, “This is 100% right.” I agree—in fact, the same argument could apply to the privacy implications of the new version of [...]

The EFF is recommending that users do not use the new Google Desktop because it greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. It seems that the the new “Search Across Computers” feature will send copies of one’s local documents to Google’s servers so that they can be searched by the user from, say, their work [...]