big evil brother

apparently microsoft is considering adding to its software the equivalent of a black box in its software for bug tracking. what isn't like the average bug tracking software, though, is the fact that this will send to microsoft a much more comprehensive report of what's going on, in terms of all applications that are running on the system at the time of the crash, as well as the contents of the documents being created. to be fair, they will allow users to specify how much information is sent. but one might first ask, what is the default choice? microsoft is notorious for having poor judgement in terms of default options. also, how many regular mom and pop users will know that they have an option to change this? finally, the fact that the infrastructure exists for grabbing this much data is scary to me, because it will be far too easy to abuse the feature.

nikon redux, noaa ban?

since my last post, nikon's encryption has been broken twice. engadget reports that both bibble labs and programmer dan coffin have reverse engineered the encryption, with coffin publishing the decryption code on his website. we'll see how this plays out, especially with how adobe uses/doesn't use the decryption workaround.

adding to my disdain of lobbyists and how easy it seems to buy a politician, slashdot reports that for-pay weather sites (i.e. accuweather) have lobbied senator rick santorum to introduce a bill that would prevent noaa from publishing its weather data for free on its website. who knew that having a government entity providing a free service to the public could be a bad thing. politicians for sale, anyone?

stifled creativity

i don't write for three months and then i post twice in the same day; frikin' awesome!

so i just read on slashdot about how adobe won't support high end nikon cameras for fear of breaking the dmca (the cameras use encryption for white balance data in the raw format). just another example of how the dmca is so misused that it stifles creativity. sure, the reason it was implemented in the first place was under good intentions, but like so many things that start off with good intentions, it got screwed up. now, all it's good for is lawsuits. the dmca and the ever changing copyright laws just stifle creativity. but on the same token, i should put blame on nikon in this case as well. the only reason nikon would encrypt whitebalance metadata in raw files is to (1) force the high end user to do color corrections on the camera or (2) force the high end user to use nikon's capturing app. in either case, i think they're simply alienating users for the sake of profit. greed greed greed.

crypto + game theory

after switching from economics to computer science, i find that there are more overlaps than i had anticipated. case in point: my interest in economics was in game theory, while my interest in computer science is in security/cryptography. combine the two, and turns out that a hot topic in security these days is the use of game theory in a cryptographic context. two players might play a game to maximize their payout, and in doing so, they authenticate. pretty interesting stuff, and something i definitely plan on reading about in greater detail.

edward felten writes in his Freedom to Tinker blog about how a Texas bill would close meetings about computer security. the more i realize how little politicians know about technology and science, the more i realize how scary it is that they would consider such idiotic methods. they need to keep these meetings open so that those actually knowledgeable in the material can provide sound input, rather than receiving selective input from some overpaid lobbyist (or receiving no input at all). we need fewer lawyers and more scientists and engineers in office. that's my $0.02.