Disqus - Latest Comments for Ed Felten

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » The Economics of Self-Help and Self-Defense in Cyberspace

Ed Felten — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:37:57 -0000

I commented on this entry in my blog, Freedom to Tinker, at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/00068...

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Lessig vs. Rosen on Net Porn Regulation

Ed Felten — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 09:59:06 -0000

For my response to the Rosen essay, and the discusssion of it here, see http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/00068...

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Protecting Digital Property With Intellectual Contract

Ed Felten — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:32:00 -0000

I don't understand how you can assert that DRM is a contract. A contract is an agreement; DRM is a machine. DRM tries to enforce some limitations on usage. Those limitations may or may not coincide with the terms of an actual contract.

This is not just a theoretical objection. I have yet to see a real DRM system that enforces rules that coincide with the terms of the copyright statute, or with the terms of any contract.

What's more, in real DRM systems, the consumer isn't allowed to inspect the DRM system to learn what it will do. How can there be a contract where one party is not allowed to know the terms?

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Protecting Digital Property With Intellectual Contract

Ed Felten — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 08:12:21 -0000

Self-help is fine, but it has to be a two-way street. If I don't have the right to do something, you should be free to use self-help to keep me from doing it. But if I *do* have the right to do something, then I ought to be able to defeat your self-help in order to do it. It's bad policy to automatically give one party's self-help mechanisms the force of law.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Choosing the Greater Evil

Ed Felten — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 10:04:52 -0000

You're right on the merits here. But you would convince more people if you stuck to arguing the merits and toned down the ad hominem attacks.

Re: Fighting Overseas IP Piracy with Price Discrimination: Will It Work?

Ed Felten — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 09:38:53 -0000

It's too simple to say that people think price discrimination is unfair because they don't understand it. I'd bet that many people who understand the basic argument for price discrimination still think it is unfair.

You write:
"Of course, many [consumers] don't understand that there are perfectly sensible reasons for drug companies to price discriminate by regional markets or countries. But that doesn't stop consumers from traveling by the busload up to Canada to purchase certain drugs below-cost!"

You imply that this is somehow inconsistent on consumers' parts. But I don't see the inconsistency.

We both know that airlines price-discriminate by charging different rates depending on your itinerary, when you buy, and so on. We understand why that they do that, and why it's efficient to let them do it. But that doesn't make us hypocrites for buying the cheaper tickets when we can. Similarly, consumers who understand why drugs cost less in Canada aren't being hypocrites when they buy drugs in Canada.

Re: An Old Refrain

Ed Felten — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:04:32 -0000

Is Ross predicting that the service will succeed? If not, he doesn't have much of an argument.

Re: The SlingBox, Space-Shifting and the Future of Broadcasting

Ed Felten — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:38:15 -0000

I'm not sure I understand your point about contracts. Contracts only bind the parties who agree to them. Networks, local affiliates, and cable operators make contracts with each other about redistribution. But viewers are not parties to those contracts, so how can viewers be bound by their terms?

Re: Tollbooths on the Internet Highway?

Ed Felten — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 09:33:47 -0000

Competition is the best way to solve this problem. But the difficult issue is whether we can have a truly competitive market. Competition is good for many reasons; but can it really be achieved by pulling the available public policy levers?

My sense is that the smarter advocates of net neutrality regulation support pro-competition policies but think those policies will have only limited success. They see regulation as a second best solution that will become necessary if, as they expect, the market is not competitive.

Re: Complete Control?

Ed Felten — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:17:06 -0000

I guess DeLong didn't read the rest of the Wikipedia entry he quotes. It gives a pretty clear picture of HDCP's security woes: "researchers demonstrated fatal flaws in HDCP for the first time in 2001 ..." It even points to commercial devices that strip HDCP protection off of video signals.

Re: Wireless, Security, and Liability

Ed Felten — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 07:39:17 -0000

In a civil suit, the standard of proof is preponderance of the evidence. If it is known for certain that some bad act was committed via your WiFi, a plaintiff only has to prove that it is more likely than not that you were the person who did it. They can brush off your argument that it might have been an outsider by saying, "Maybe, but probably not."

Re: French Not So Sensible After All?

Ed Felten — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 08:00:21 -0000

As I understand it, the French bill contains both DMCRA-like reforms (which you like) and the open design requirement (which you don't).

The open design part won't have much effect. The main barriers to interoperating with FairPlay are legal, not technical. It's not that hard to figure out the information you need by reverse engineering. If the French want interoperation, all they have to do is make sure that reverse engineering and interoperation are clearly legal, and the market will take care of the rest.

Re: The RFID cookie monster

Ed Felten — Mon, 08 May 2006 16:01:43 -0000

RFID chips were designed with one set of uses in mind, but they are actually implemented in ways that allow other (mis)uses as well. There's a small scholarly literature on these sorts of RFID problems. For example, David Molnar has a paper (with colleagues) about the library attacks, and there are several papers about e-passport issues.

There is some silly RFID panic out there; but these sorts of technical problems are real.

The cookie bit is hard to follow, even to techies like me. I think it's meant as an analogy, and what is really going on is that the guy can write information onto the RFID tag and then use various monitoring and reporting functions of the RFID-using system to figure out where the tag went. For example, maybe he can get the EZ-Pass system to report to him where a car went (instead of, or in addition to, reporting that information to the owner of the car). That sort of attack is probably possible.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Meta-Critique

Ed Felten — Wed, 17 May 2006 00:28:38 -0000

The statement that "If 'open' must mean one can't hide anything* from the user, well, open source is going to have problems implementing *any security technique..." shows a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of computer security.

In fact, security is enhanced by the user's understanding of how the system works, just as aviation safety is enhanced by the pilot's understanding of how the plane works.

Re: Muted Responses All Around to ‘Pirate Bay’ Shutdown

Ed Felten — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 09:56:12 -0000

As you point out, it's hard to offer much commentary about the raid without knowing whether PirateBay was violating Swedish law -- a point on which almost everybody is unqualified to speak.

Surely you wouldn't approve of the Swedish police mounting this kind of raid against a lawful site?

Re: Hollaar on the DMCA, WIPO, and Ed Felten

Ed Felten — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:39:39 -0000

Tim,

I'm not sure why you think our First Amendment claim indicates that we weren't fighting to publish our paper. If the court had ruled that our paper did violate the DMCA, then the First Amendment argument was the best (and probably only) way to get the paper published.

DMCA boosters can repeat the speech-was-not-chilled claim as often as they like, but it's still false. There are two big examples of the chill. First, WE ACTUALLY DID WITHDRAW THE PAPER FROM PUBLICATION at the Information Hiding Workshop. Second, ONE OF MY COLLEAGUES LOST HIS JOB BECAUSE OF THE PAPER. Sorry for yelling, but I'm sick of having this lie repeated.

At the time we filed our suit, the RIAA and SDMI had not withdrawn their threats -- they told the press that they had never objected to our paper (which was false) but they refused to tell us that they would not sue if we published the paper. And note that the RIAA and SDMI were not the only two parties that had threatened us. The other party, Verance, had done nothing to withdraw their threat. It was only after we filed our lawsuit that all of them promised definitively not to sue.

Note that the IPI paper is extensively footnoted. But the paragrpah that makes false assertions about our paper and lawsuit has no footnotes, no quotations, no references to primary documents. That's because their claims aren't supported by the record.

Re: Hollaar on the DMCA, WIPO, and Ed Felten

Ed Felten — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 23:14:35 -0000

Lee,

I'm not sure what you're trying to imply when you call my statement "extraordinary". If you're trying to imply that the statement is false, then all I can say is that you should have talked to some of the people involved before making assertions about what did or didn't happen.

Your statement that our speech was not chilled is clearly inconsistent with the facts, for example with the fact that we had to withdraw our paper from publication in IHW, and the fact that Verance made legal threats against us and asked for a long list of redactions in the paper.

Your statement that the RIAA withdrew their threat before we filed the suit is also false. What evidence do you have to support it? (Pay attention to dates -- they did withdraw the threat later.)

Re: Hollaar on the DMCA, WIPO, and Ed Felten

Ed Felten — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:37:40 -0000

Lee,

This is why I asked you to be careful about dates. The Oppenheim letter to which the judge referred was sent after we filed our suit. The issue in that court hearing was not about the state of affairs when we filed the suit; it was about whether the suit could continue given RIAA, SDMI, and Verance had, AFTER WE FILED THE SUIT, withdrawn their threats.

Do you have any evidence, either in the record or out, that the RIAA, SDMI, and Verance withdrew their threats before we filed the suit?

Re: Hollaar on the DMCA, WIPO, and Ed Felten

Ed Felten — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 14:07:15 -0000

That last comment was from me.

Re: Mandatory Data Retention: How Much is Appropriate?

Ed Felten — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 19:32:27 -0000

I would have the opposite worry about making the government pay the cost of data retention: the cost might be too low. The marginal cost, per byte of data stored, is dropping exponentially due to Moore's Law. There are fixed costs, but once those are paid the cost of adding to the data store could be very small.

In the long run, the true cost of data retention will be due to the risk that data will leak or be misused. Unless those costs are taken into account, government will buy too much data retention.

Re: Microsoft’s New Security Problem: McAfee

Ed Felten — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 08:00:50 -0000

From a technical perspective, antivirus products like McAfee and Norton are no substitute for secure construction of the underlying OS. At best, antivirus products can partially plug some of the vulnerabilities in the underlying OS. What people were criticizing Microsoft for back in 2002, and what Microsoft started trying hard to change, was the prevalence of holes in Windows.

The original post seems to just assume that Microsoft's questioned actions will make Windows more secure. If Microsoft's actions do lock out some antivirus products or constrain their ability to protect users, then security may suffer. (Whether third-party programs can download and run is only part of the question. Once they're downloaded and running, how much latitude do they have to protect the user?) Only a detailed, technically sophisticated examination of what Microsoft is doing can tell us whether the company's actions will improve security. To just assume the result of that analysis is to ignore the most important question here.

Re: The Ideal Voting Machine?

Ed Felten — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:06:59 -0000

A small correction: the article gives Wired's voting-machine recommendations, arrived at after talking to Dave Wagner and me. Don't assume that Dave and I both agree with every last thing in the article.

Re: Hear Me Stumble over My Words

Ed Felten — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:31:59 -0000

Noel,

Unclear writing reflects either (a) clear thinking, poorly expressed, or (b) unclear thinking. The DMCA looks like unclear thinking.

If you think there's a clear idea underneath the DMCA's conceptual clutter, tell us what it is. What should the DMCA have said, in detail?

Re: Social Sharecropping?

Ed Felten — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 13:43:08 -0000

Noel,

In case it wasn't clear, I'm using the economists' definition of value.

Consider these two scenarios. (A) I will cook dinner and my wife washes the dishes; no money is exchanged. (B) My wife pays me $5 to cook dinner, then I pay her $5 to wash the dishes.

The same value is created in both scenarios: the value of having dinner cooked, plus the value of having the dishes cleaned.

Re: AEI-Brookings Paper on Network Neutrality

Ed Felten — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 07:46:16 -0000

Richard,

I think you're missing the point of the end-to-end argument. The point was not to engineer the network for a particular kind of application. The point was to engineer a maximally flexible network, because we didn't know which applications people would want.

Re: AEI-Brookings Paper on Network Neutrality

Ed Felten — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 07:48:25 -0000

Regarding the RFC citations: the longer version of the paper does cite specific RFCs. But Hahn and Litan seem to have misunderstood the RFCs they cite, which mostly recommend an end-to-end approach.

Re: Do wireless tubes need to be neutral too?

Ed Felten — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:37:21 -0000

For what it's worth, I'm a reasonably happy CableCard customer. Over the holidays we switched from the universally hated Motorola settop DVR box to the vastly superior Generation 3 Tivo. The Tivo uses two CableCards (one for each of its two tuners), and they have worked flawlessly so far.

Re: File Sharing’s Funny Math

Ed Felten — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:02:32 -0000

As Tim points out in the post, Peter Eckersley found a signature field in the Apple files. So I corrected the post that Tim quoted. For the record, his quotes capture the original version of the post correctly.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Comcast, Reset Packets, and Network Neutrality

Ed Felten — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:00:31 -0000

Richard,

The paper you cite points out inefficiencies in DOCSIS (when used with TCP, which it almost always will be). But it doesn't provide technical justification for the steps Comcast is taking. The paper's main result is that DOCSIS has trouble when lots of users are browsing the Web. Then why doesn't Comcast throttle Web traffic? Why do they throttle by sending RSTs rather than dropping packets or adjusting behavior at the DOCSIS level? Isn't the real problem that their network is underprovisioned, with too many users sharing the same termination system?

Re: US Air’s Control Freakery

Ed Felten — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:57:04 -0000

The window shade business might have a legitimate rationale. Having the shades up (a) ensures adequate light inside the plane even if the power fails, and (b) makes any dangerous conditions outside the plane more visible.

Re: Grad School Bleg

Ed Felten — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:37:07 -0000

Princeton is obviously the right choice -- why not go to grad school where Dan Wallach went? ;)

Re: Public Knowledge blows it

Ed Felten — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 19:27:50 -0000

The "error" you point to is just a decision on my part to simplify the explanation for nontechnical readers. If you want to write a short paper that nontechies will be willing and able to understand, you have to leave some things out. The congestion control discussion is about the cooperative nature of TCP backoff. For that purpose it's enough to know that TCP works that way, and there is lots of TCP traffic.