Posted on October 31st, 2006 by Derek Bambauer
Chris Soghoian, a CS student at Indiana, wrote a now-infamous program that allowed Internet users to print valid-looking, but fake, Northwest Airlines boarding passes. The passes could allow someone to pass through airport security (run by the Transportation Security Administration) without having purchased a ticket, or under a fake name. The problem has been nosed […]
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Filed under: Court Decisions, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Media, Privacy, Security
Posted on October 31st, 2006 by William McGeveran
Dave Hoffman at Concurring Opinions has published the first of what he says will be a series of posts about XOXOHTH, the (in)famous discussion board supposedly aimed at law school applicants, law students, and new law firm associates. Messages are anonymous, and some of the content is not, shall we say, edifying. Putting aside the […]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Blogging, Digital Media, Internet & Society, Law School
Posted on October 25th, 2006 by Tim Armstrong
Via Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog comes word of an important announcement from the editors of the Northwestern University Law Review. The editors have been paying close attention to the open-access debate (see here for Bill’s terrific compilation of links to many of the most interesting recent posts), and after giving the matter careful thought, […]
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Filed under: Law School, Open Access, Open Standards, Scholarship
Posted on October 24th, 2006 by Derek Bambauer
The vision of an Internet that is an intellectual free-fire zone of easy, cheap, speedy communication is increasingly challenged by governments through technology and law. North Korea deals with the risk that the Net might undermine juche’s illusion of that country’s superiority by creating a “walled garden” of sanitized content; access to the real Internet […]
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Filed under: Filtering, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, ISP, VoIP
Posted on October 24th, 2006 by William McGeveran
A student of mine, knowing of my interest in Info/Law, pointed me to a recent notice that Marvel Comics sent to its artists warning them to avoid excessive copying when working from potentially copyrighted source material for inspiration. The notice is reproduced here. Marvel is notorious for being grossly overreaching and litigious in relation to […]
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Filed under: Copyright, Media, Trademarks
Posted on October 21st, 2006 by William McGeveran
Wendy Seltzer has dissected the End User License Agreement (the agreement where the user needs to click “I Agree”) for Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system. She is not impressed. Many commenters to her post chime in with their own objections to the EULA. Discussion question: Is this “badware“?
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Filed under: badware, Berkman, Digital Media, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Microsoft, Open Standards, Privacy, Security, Software
Posted on October 21st, 2006 by William McGeveran
Ethan Zuckerman has a delightful post recounting an apparently delightful talk by Oxford University Press lexicographer Erin McKean at the Pop!Tech 2006 conference. (Hat tip to John Palfrey.) The convergence of technology and lexicography is an exciting place. Ethan talks a little about dictionary mash-ups and peer production of dictionaries. McKean has spoken elsewhere about […]
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Filed under: Berkman, Copyright, Digital Media, Education & Copyright, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Peer Production, Scholarship, Search Engines
Posted on October 21st, 2006 by William McGeveran
John Dickerson has a poignant article in Slate about his automated online research for a biography of his mother, the famous broadcast journalist Nancy Dickerson. (I know “poignant” and “Slate” rarely belong in the same sentence, but it’s true this one time.) Dickerson had a difficult relationship with his mother. As the spiders on Google […]
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Filed under: Digital Media, Internet & Society, Media, Privacy, Search Engines
Posted on October 17th, 2006 by William McGeveran
The Berkman Center has posted a well-produced podcast based on the case studies we used in our Digital Learning Challenge white paper. In addition to an interview with principal investigator Terry Fisher and some of the Berkman fellows who worked for him (including yours truly), the producers spoke to several of the great people who […]
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Filed under: Berkman, Copyright, Digital Media, Education & Copyright
Posted on October 17th, 2006 by Tim Armstrong
One of the seeming paradoxes of the networked communications revolution is how converting information from tangible, physical form to streams of electronic bits makes that information less, rather than more, transitory and ephemeral. There are plenty of factors we might cite as contributing causes — the cost of mass storage is now tiny and still […]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Intermediaries, Media, Privacy, Security