"internet policy" entries

Four short links: 23 January 2012

Four short links: 23 January 2012

Wearable Computing, Secure Implants, Budget Game, Restoring Democracy

  1. Adafruit Flora — wearable electronics and accessories platform. (via Tim O’Reilly)
  2. Killed by Code — paper on software vulnerabilities in implantable medical devices. Discovered via Karen Sandler’s wow-generating keynote at linux.conf.au (covered here). (via Selena Deckelmann)
  3. DIY London — fun little Budget-Hero game to make apparent the trade-offs facing politicians. Kids should play Sim* and Civilization games: you get a sense of tradeoffs and consequences from these that you don’t from insubstantial activities. More City Hall games, please! (via David Eaves)
  4. Lessig on How Money Corrupts Congress (Rolling Stone) — glad to see Larry’s profile rising. This is key: I lay out my own voucher program that tries to do that, but the challenge isn’t as much to imagine the solution as much as it is to imagine the process to bring about the solution, given how entrenched the cancer is and how much the very people we need to reform the system depend upon the existing system. (see also an excerpt from Lessig’s new book) (via Long Now)

Sprint blocking Cogent network traffic…

It appears that Sprint has stopped routing traffic (called “depeering”) from Cogent as a result of some sort of legal dispute. Sprint customers cannot reach Cogent customers, and vice versa. The effect is similar to what would happen if Sprint were to block voice phonecalls to AT&T customers. Here’s a graph that shows the outage, courtesy of Keynote : Rich…

Kaminsky DNS Patch Visualization

Dan Kaminsky has posted the details of the widespread DNS vulnerability. Clarified Networks created this visualization of DNS patch deployment over the past month: Red = Unpatched Yellow = Patched, "but NAT is screwing things up" Green = OK…

Encouraging results from Peer-to-Patent


Peer-to-Patent

is carrying off one of the most audacious experiments in Internet
activism in our day.
A report released by the non-profit project in

PDF format

reports the data from surveys and an analysis of patents handled
during the first year of the project. The sample is small (23 patents)
but bears some impressive fruit.

Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory for production services!

Google App Engine went down earlier today. GAE is still a developer preview release, and currently lacks a public monitoring dashboard. Unfortunately this means that many people either found out from their app and/or admin consoles being unavailable or from Mike Arrington's post on TechCrunch. Google has a strong Web Operations culture, and there are numerous internal monitoring tools in…

The wiretapping accusation against P2P and copyright filtering: evidence that we need more user/provider discussion

Celebrated law expert Paul Ohm suggests that cable companies and other
ISPs might be breaking the federal wiretap law by doing deep packet
inspection. But the same kinds of deep inspection that Ohm decries is
also used for spam and virus filtering. On the other hand, I wonder
whether web mail services such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Google would be
guilty of wiretapping if they check traffic. These dilemma suggest to
me that the relationship between ISPs (or mail service providers) and
customers has to change, and perhaps that the wiretap statute has to
adapt.

Yochai Benkler, others at Harvard map current and future Internet

Harvard’s world-renowned
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
is celebrating its tenth anniversary with a conference called
Berkman@10.
The center is a conglomeration of many people, both lawyers and
non-lawyers, who study the Internet and add their efforts to empower
its users.
In my opinion, the most salient contribution of the Berkman Center
is its devotion to new research instead of pure theory.
I’ll report here on today’s sessions, which were organized as a fairly
conventional symposium (although as loosely as one could run it with
450 attendees).

Book review: "The Future of the Internet (And How to Stop It)"

You can read Jonathan Zittrain's book for cogent discussions of key
issues in copyright, filtering, licensing, censorship, and other
pressing issues in computing and networking. But you're rewarded even
more if you read this book to grasp fundamental questions of law and
society "The Future of the Internet" offers valuable summaries of
current debates, but Zittrain also tries always to hack away at the
brambles that block the end of each path.

You Become what You Disrupt – (part two)

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users. This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop….

Amazon improves EC2 (by embracing failure)

Amazon just announced two big improvements to EC2: Multiple LocationsAmazon EC2 now provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of regions and Availability Zones. Regions are geographically dispersed and will be in separate geographic areas or countries. Currently, Amazon EC2 exposes only a single region. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered…