Abstract: The entertainment industry, facing a formidable threat from peer-to-peer piracy networks, is exploring every possible means to attack these networks.

The industry is also employing defensive strategies to protect media and media players from those who would extract and copy their content. These content protection systems depend on the computer industry’s newly announced ‘trusted computing’ technologies.

While "trusted computing" technologies may better protect media and media players from content extraction by pirates, we assert that the very same technologies can be employed to better protect pirates and their peer-to-peer distribution networks from the entertainment industry.

Trusted Computing, Peer-To-Peer Distribution, and the Economics of Pirated Entertainment [PDF]

Decentralized anonymity systems tend to be unreliable, because users must choose paths through the network without knowing the entire state of the network. Reputation systems can improve reliability by predicting the state of the network. In this paper we focus on anonymous remailers and anonymous publishing, explain why the systems can benefit from reputation, and describe our experiences designing reputation systems for them while still ensuring anonymity. We find that in each example we first must redesign the underlying anonymity system to support verifiable transactions.

Reputation in P2P Anonymity Systems [PDF]

Social software is a dynamic and constantly evolving environment, rich with possibilities to create better connections between people. With a growing number of active developers, we need a central nexus to help drive the process of coordination and interoperability between different developers' products.

Founding members include Ross Mayfield, Clay Shirky, and David Weinberger. Howard Rheingold also participated in the most recent Happening.

Social Software Alliance

The DMCA impedes the progress of science, is economically unjustifiable, and lacks the balance the Constitution requires of intellectual property legislation.

Pamela Samuelson of UC Berkeley writes about DRM in the April 2003 issue of Communications of the ACM. She has made the article freely available from her web site; no subscription is required. Note: the linked document has no DRM :)

DRM {and, or, vs.} the Law

Katie Hafner writes about "Net evaders" -- people who steer clear of the Internet and its services despite being in close proximity to connected computers and other avid Internet users. The article is based on survey research by the Pew Trust.

As a bit of a "cellular evader" myself, I would submit that this phenomenon is not specific to the Internet.

Eluding the Web's Snare

We discuss the dangers that scalable Internet functionality may present to the real world, focusing on a simple yet impactful attack that we believe may occur quite soon. We offer and critique various solutions to this class of attack and hope to provide a warning to the Internet community of what is currently possible. The attack is, to some degree, a consequence of the availability of private information on the Web, and the increase in the amount of personal information that users must reveal to obtain Web services.

Avi Rubin's latest effort; this paper is profiled in today's NYT.

Defending Against an Internet-based Attack on the Physical World [PDF]

These pathways may lead to new technologies or training techniques and provoke a new look at deception doctrine applicable at every level of war.

Unweaving the Web: Deception and Adaptation in Future Urban Operations | RAND

Using the rich profile data provided by the users we were able to deduce the attributes contributing to the formation of friendships, and to determine how the similarity of users decays as the distance between them in the network increases.

This research is a collaboration between HP Labs and Google. It will appear in a future issue of First Monday.

A Social Network Caught in the Web [PDF]

Try to visit this URL for an NYT article by Amy Harmon entitled, "More Than Just a Game, But How Close to Reality?" It's from April 3, 2003 -- only nine days ago, and yet NYT has already moved the article into its pay-per-view archive. Lame.

Even articles from April 4 have already been moved to the archive.

NYT Archive Policy Gets More Aggressive

Then it came to me. I said I used to be an executive vice president and a director of interactive marketing for Rapp Digital, a digital media company with 300 employees and a P. and L. of $40 million."

Commute to Nowhere