Tech Policy

Kudos to Larry Lessig

Lessig on  freedom to publish academic material without excessive restrictions on their distribution.

But today, on the brink of publication, I had to confront the "Publication Agreement." In order to give the Minnesota Law Review my work, I have also to give them my copyright. In particular, they get the "exclusive right to authorize the publication, reproduction, and distribution" of my work. They have in turn sold that right to Lexis and Westlaw.

Never again. It has taken me too long to resolve myself about this, and it was too late in the process of this article to insist on something different. But from this moment on, I am committed to the Open Access pledge:

I will not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

I am personally tired of having to pay excessive fees for all the course readers. I wonder how many academics would start insisting on a creative commons license for journal publications. It turns out that tenure is really worth something!

P.S. LawDork points out that Washington Post ran a story on Creative Commons yesterday.

Got Bandwidth?

Lisa Rein could use some server space and bandwidth if you can spare any. Please let here know at lisarein "at" finetuning.com if you can help. Lisa captures clips from the Daily Show among many other very useful material. I am always amazed by her effort and her generocity in hosting a great media archive. She is looking for people to mirror some of the clips, so please help if you can.

MIT in FT

There are at least three articles in today's Financial Times about MIT. I thought that you may find them interesting:

• MIT chief urges research funds boost
• Overhaul of a grand institution
• Admirers in Europe plan to create rival

Quote from the third article:

"The whole ethos of the place is that the work should be relevant to industry," says Prof Kelly. "Another point is that work at MIT is based on solving problems - and not on traditional disciplines."

Michael Hammer, who is currently visiting Engineering Systems Division commented that this looked like a good definition for ESD.

Smart people are dangerous

From the truly neat and truly scary department, via Slashdot a ZDNet article on a new way to track a PC on the Internet.  A PhD student at Berkeley wrote a paper on a way to tell exactly which computers are making which Internet requests without knowledge of the user, regardless of the firewall or anonymising protections the computer and network may have.  The technique involves monitoring the "time skews" of individual machines, which are the small differences in a computers internal clock.

I haven't read the whole paper, but I would presume that for this to work the tracker would need access to all of the packets the travel over a subsection of the network, which from what I know is not easy to do unless you own the network.  (Presumably a Carnivore-like system would monitor this data, though).  Second, on the privacy front, for someone to be able to peg activity coming from a machine to a _specific_ machine would require some way of matching the unique time skew to the machine, which can be trivial or extremely complicated depending on the level of network protections.

At any rate, it is scary to see what smart people can do.  I've racked my brain to come up with a "good" use... but anything I come up with sounds straight out of DMCA or Patriot act.  I take comfort in the thought that it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with a simple piece of software that will randomly vary the microseconds on the outgoing TCP packet timestamp and render the tracking technique moot.