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In the Comments
No offense, but you all are showing your age. No one under 30 takes Facebook all that seriously, and they certainly don’t expect privacy & security. The entire site is a high tech freshman mixer — nothing more. --Mike
Facebook Goes Back to 'Schools'
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What Place for Politics on a Gay and Lesbian Library Listserv? | Comment [1]
Carnegie Mellon Students Design Program to Double-Check Security Certificates | Comment
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August 27, 2008
Patent Office Will Continue Reexamination of Blackboard's Controversial Patent
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected a request by Blackboard Inc. for a temporary halt in the office’s review of a software patent the company holds concerning course-management systems.
This year Blackboard won a lawsuit in federal court against a rival software company, Desire2Learn, for violating the patent, though Desire2Learn has appealed the decision. Meanwhile, Desire2Learn had formally challenged the validity of the patent with the patent office, arguing that it is overly broad and covers technology that other companies had developed before Blackboard filed its patent. The patent office issued an initial verdict in March that rejected all 44 of the claims that make up Blackboard’s patent. But that review is “nonfinal,” meaning that the review is still underway.
Blackboard officials filed a request to the patent office in May asking that the review of the patent be put on hold until the patent lawsuit is fully resolved. The patent office denied the request this month.
“You run the risk of having conflicting rulings along the way, so we had asked the patent office to stay the reexamination,” said Matthew Small, Blackboard’s general counsel, when asked why the company made the request. He described the setback as “a small procedural matter.”
Bruce Wieder, a partner with the Washington law firm Dow Lohnes, said he was not surprised by the decision, since the patent reexamination and the lawsuit are both well under way and are sufficiently different. “As my mother used to say, It never hurts to ask,” he quipped. He said final decisions were not expected anytime soon in either proceeding, and that it would likely be years before the patent issue is resolved.
Officials from Desire2Learn touted the ruling on a blog it runs tracking the patent dispute. “We look forward to the next step in the reexamination process,” said the statement. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Wednesday August 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [7]August 25, 2008
Plagiarism Allegations Boot a Student From a Study-Abroad Trip
Allison Routman, a senior at Ohio University, seemed to have a pretty good plan for the summer: She had earned a spot in the University of Virginia’s Semester at Sea program, so she would tour the Mediterranean Sea on a boat, studying social justice. But then a Wikipedia entry, and some sloppy research, brought her idyllic summer to an abrupt halt, according to U-Wire.
For a report on the film Europa Europa, Ms. Routman consulted the open-source encyclopedia’s entry on the movie, copying three phrases — “when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa,” “German speaking minority outside of Germany,” and “who had just been released from a concentration camp.” The student says she thought she’d done nothing wrong by cutting and pasting the material.
But officials with the study-abroad program begged to differ. A panel of professors found Ms. Routman guilty of academic misconduct, and she was summarily expelled. (In fact, Ms. Routman says, she was told to arrange her own trip home from Greece.)
Officials with Semester at Sea read the University of Virginia’s honor code at the start of the expedition, so Ms. Routman may have been properly warned about the penalty for plagiarism. But the student says she didn’t receive a fair chance to clear her name: The jury that considered the case was comprised of professors, not Ms. Routman’s peers, and Ms. Routman says she was not given an adviser to help her through the process.
Regardless of the merits of Ms. Routman’s case, the incident raises an interesting question: If “soft” plagiarism from Wikipedia is becoming more common, should institutions change their policies for dealing with alleged honor-code violations? —Brock Read
August 20, 2008
Judge Frees the Tongues of MIT Subway Hackers
Three MIT students can now talk, but not because of their right to free speech. For the past 10 days, the trio has been restrained by a judge’s order from describing their now-celebrated exposure of a flaw in the Boston transit system’s fare card. Yesterday a U.S. District Court judge in Boston lifted the gag order because he did not believe the students had violated a federal law against transmitting malicious computer software, CNET reports. Many had expected the matter to be decided along First Amendment interpretations, but instead the decision turned on the issue of what counted as “transmission” of software and what did not.
The three, as The Chronicle reported last week, showed there were vulnerabilities in the computer-read cards used to pay fares on the Boston subway, flaws that could allow people to get a free ride. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is providing a lawyer for the students, said the work was done to show the flaws in the system so they could be fixed before a malicious attacker used them. (The students’ paper got an A in an MIT computer-science class.) But the Boston transit system sued to stop the students from talking about the research at Defcon, a hacker convention, citing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Talking about the code publicly, the transit system argued, was an illegal transmission of a computer program under the act. A judge who was on duty the weekend the suit was filed issued a temporary restraining order that silenced the students until a hearing could be held.
On Tuesday another judge, George O’Toole Jr., gave the students leave to speak. The talk they had planned to give at Defcon was not a computer-to-computer transmission but simply a talk to people, he said. He also noted that the transit system had not proved the students had caused at least $5,000 damage, a provision for invoking the federal statute. Ruling that the law was not applicable, Judge O’Toole avoided any First Amendment issues. That did not, however, stop the EFF from issuing a statement describing the decision as a “free speech victory.”
After today’s ruling, the Boston transit system could continue pressing its lawsuit, but statements from officials indicated they were not too keen on that idea. And the students can reveal the details of their work in public. Whether they will or not is anyone’s guess. Their lawyer wasn’t saying. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Wednesday August 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]August 15, 2008
MIT Students Are Ordered to Reveal How They Hacked the Boston Subway
First, they were told to be quiet. Now, they are being ordered to squeal. Zack Anderson, Alessandro Chiesa, and R.J. Ryan, three MIT students, were ordered yesterday by a U.S. District Court judge to turn over a paper they wrote for a class in which they described how to hack the Boston subway system. Last week another judge stopped the students from presenting their results at Defcon 16, a hacker’s convention in Las Vegas, the Boston Globe reports.
The trio exploited some vulnerabilities in the computer-chip and magnetic-strip systems used to pay fares on the Boston subway and showed how to get a free ride, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is providing a lawyer for the students. The students and the EFF say the work was done to show the flaws in the system so they could be fixed before a malicious attacker used them. (The paper got an “A” in an MIT computer-science class, the EFF says.) But the Boston transit system sued to stop the students from talking about the research at Defcon, citing a federal law against computer crime. Their argument was that simply talking about the code publicly was illegal transmission of a computer program intended to do harm, and a judge issued a restraining order.
The students, and their EFF lawyer, argue that the trio’s First Amendment rights are being violated and that this is a clear case of prior restraint. They also note that most of the information about the security flaw is already publicly available.
Yesterday a judge ordered the students to turn over the paper and related documents so he could determine whether the students had really broken a law or whether their rights to free speech were being infringed upon. The court set a hearing on the matter for next Tuesday. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Friday August 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [8]August 8, 2008
Tech Workers' Complaint About Longer Student Visas Is Rejected
Bad news for technology workers trying to block student-visa extensions this week. A U.S. district court judge in New Jersey rejected an attempt by the Programmers Guild and other groups to stop the government from extending the visas from one year to 29 months.
Computerworld reports that the guild and fellow litigants had asked for an injunction, arguing that the extension would hurt U.S. workers because it would lead to more foreign students getting H-1B visas and competing for technology jobs.
But U.S. District Judge Faith Hochberg denied the request, saying that opponents could not show they had been directly hurt by the visa extension, which was approved earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Instead of alleging concrete injury, plaintiffs assert a generalized grievance with a particular government policy,” the judge wrote.
The Programmers Guild had argued that members “will experience further job displacement, denials of job opportunities, wage depression and increase[d] job competition by a DHS estimate of 12,000 to 30,000 foreign workers.” But the judge wrote that the plaintiffs had not shown they would suffer any more injury than any other part of the general public. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Friday August 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [3]August 6, 2008
Civil-Liberties Group Offers Legal Help to Computer Researchers
Researchers who fear that their work in encryption and computer security could run afoul of the law will be getting support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation under an initiative called the Coders’ Rights Project.
The foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes civil liberties in cyberspace, announced today that the project will offer researchers assistance on legal issues related to computer-security vulnerabilities, intellectual property and free speech, and reverse engineering, which involves taking apart a technology to see how it works.
Computer scientists’ work is often stymied by bogus legal threats, said Jennifer Granick, the foundation’s civil liberties director, in a prepared statement.
Added Edward W. Felten, a Princeton University computer scientist: “The Coders’ Rights Project will give critical legal help to programmers and developers who do the hard work in keeping technology robust and users safe.”
The group provided legal representation to Mr. Felten when he challenged the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 2001. He argued that the act’s anti-circumvention provision stifles computer scientists from pursuing encryption research. The provision makes it a crime for someone to distribute decryption technology that can circumvent access controls on copyrighted works. A federal judge dismissed the case.
In a related, more recent, case a Dutch-based semiconductor company sued Radboud University Nijmegen, also in the Netherlands, in an effort to stop researchers from publishing a paper exposing security flaws in the company’s transit smart-cards. A Dutch court ruled last month that the researchers could publish their findings.—Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Wednesday August 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [3]August 5, 2008
Microsoft Is Again in the Crosshairs of a University-Based Patent Suit
A federal appeals court has given the company that manages a set of lucrative technology patents for the University of Rochester another chance to pursue its infringement claims against Microsoft. The ruling reverses a lower-court finding that said the university-based inventors intended to mislead the patent office.
The patents cover a technique for computer-driven printing technology known as Blue Noise Mask. A company called Research Corporation Technologies, in Arizona, has the rights to commercialize the patents from the university and has collected tens of millions of dollars in royalties for the university by licensing the patents to companies.
In a ruling released late last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said a district-court judge in Arizona had erred when he ruled in 2006 that the university’s patents were unenforceable.
The judge had ruled against the patents after finding that the two University of Rochester inventors did not disclose previously published articles about their invention to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. But the appeals court said the findings in the publication “were not material to their inventive activity,” and so the inventors were not required to report it.
Research Corporation Technologies, based in Tucson, Ariz., first sued Microsoft in 2001.
The appeals court vacated the ruling and, in an ususual move, ordered the case to be re-heard by another district-court judge. —Goldie Blumenstyk
Posted on Tuesday August 5, 2008 | Permalink | CommentAugust 4, 2008
A New Trial for Jammie Thomas?
One of the Recording Industry Association of America’s most symbolically important legal victories—its first and only win over a piracy suspect in a jury trial—is on the line today in a Minnesota courtroom, according to Wired‘s Threat Level blog.
Ten months ago a Duluth jury ordered alleged song swapper Jammie Thomas to pay $222,000 for sharing 24 copyrighted songs. The victory legitimized the RIAA’s legal strategy of pursuing individual file-sharing suspects, and it seemed likely to dissuade some other defendants from bringing their cases to court.
But in May, Michael Davis, the district-court judge who heard the civil case, raised the possibility of a mistrial. Mr. Davis said he may have erred in telling the jury that Ms. Thomas was liable for copyright infringement as long as she was “making copyrighted sound recordings available” on KaZaA, no matter if the RIAA could prove that other network users had actually downloaded any of the tunes. That instruction appears to conflict with a binding precedent from the same court, so Mr. Davis called today’s hearing to examine whether the case should be reheard.
For the RIAA, today’s hearing is about a lot more than just the $222,000 owed by Ms. Thomas. The trade group can seldom, if ever, furnish proof that particular songs have been downloaded illegally, so it certainly hopes that the standard of proof lies where Mr. Davis initially told the jury it did.—Brock Read
July 31, 2008
Lawyers for 2 Female Students at Yale Law School Learn Identities of Anonymous Online Attackers
Lawyers for two women at Yale Law School who charged a Web site with destroying their reputations have learned the identities of some of the individuals who posted to the site derogatory comments about the women, according to an article Wednesday in Wired.
A year ago the women sued an administrator for the Web site, AutoAdmit, and several others who posted messages to the site under pseudonyms. The messages were filled with misogynist attacks on the women. One message called one of the women a “stupid bitch.” In another, the commenter announced his/her intention to repeatedly sodomize one of the women.
The women who filed the lawsuit have not revealed their identities. They stated in their lawsuit that the online postings caused them to suffer emotionally and professionally.
The Wired article notes that the anonymous posters who have been unmasked by the women’s lawyers could have their fledgling legal careers short-circuited if their names are published in court records.—Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Thursday July 31, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [18]July 25, 2008
Cable Industry Likens Itself to Academe in Managing Network Traffic
In an effort to dissuade the Federal Communications Commission from penalizing cable companies for prioritizing peer-to-peer traffic, the cable industry is arguing that colleges do the same thing.
The National Cable & Telecommunications Association wrote a letter to the agency, dated Thursday, arguing that it is not “anticompetitive” for their member cable companies to prohibit or limit certain peer-to-peer programs. The agency is probing a complaint that Comcast had been slowing down the exchange of files that used the BitTorrent protocol in violation of the FCC’s network management principles.
“Virtually all of the top national universities, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, restrict users’ ability to engage in activities that cause excessive congestion,” the industry letter reads.
It goes on to state, “It is hard to argue that this narrowly tailored network management of P2P services by cable operators is not really aimed at congestion and has a more sinister anticompetitive purpose and effect when many colleges and universities have adopted more draconian approaches to address the same problem.”
The letter documents the network traffic policies of 16 elite colleges and universities, including Princeton, Harvard, and Yale Universities.
The technology blog, Ars Techica, argues that the cable industry’s analogy doesn’t quite work. “These schools don’t sell broadband connections to the general public promising hitherto untold levels of orgasmically fast upload and download access—like Big Cable does.” —-Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Friday July 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [1]