Tag Archives: Computer law

Learning in the Open

Here’s a piece I wrote for the WSJ on open source education resources. It’s part of the free section of WSJ.com. A revolution of sorts is sweeping education. In the past few years, educational material, from handwritten lecture notes to whole courses, has been made available online, free for anyone who wants it. Backed by… Read More »

Marketers Baffled By Spam Laws

This new spam law, so far, is taking us nowhere. A new survey conducted by email marketing service Blue Sky Factory reckons that nearly half of email marketers aren’t sure whether the stuff they send out is compliant and more than half admit that they do not understand the new U.S. laws (called, catchily but… Read More »

Update: Diebold Withdraws E-voting Suit?

 Further to my column about e-voting a few weeks back, Diebold, maker of electronic voting machines, has apparently withdrawn its suit against an ISP and some individuals for posting leaked company documents about some of the problems with their system. Stanford Law School reports that Diebold had filed papers with the court saying it ?has… Read More »

News: Have Microsoft Done It Again?

 An excellent, and damning, article by Robert X. Cringely on Microsoft shenanigans, this time in court over a lawsuit with Burst.com. Read the whole thing: In short, Microsoft appear to have been caught deleting emails that could be evidence. The judge has ordered Microsoft to produce the missing messages.     Here’s Robert’s conclusion: “What… Read More »

News: Cracking a Password is Fast

Now your Microsoft Windows password can be cracked in 13.6 seconds, a vast improvement over the slow and tedious 101 seconds it took previously. An improved cryptanalytic method uses large amounts of memory–in this case, 1.4 GB–to speed its cracking of keys, says Security Wire Digest. I won’t bore you with how they did it.… Read More »