Thursday, April 14, 2005

Prank paper fools scientists. On CNN [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] 10:43:57 PM    comment []

Passwords Alone Don't Protect Trade Secrets. A court ruled that simply password-protecting a file isn't enough to make it a trade secret. To establish that information is a trade secret under the ITSA, two requirements must be met: (1) the plaintiff must show the information was sufficiently secret to give the plaintiff a competitive advantage, and (2) the plaintiff must show that it took affirmative measures to prevent others from acquiring or using the information. Although the court determined in this case that the customer lists met the first requirement, it denied trade secret protection based on the second requirement. The court held that "[r]estricting access to sensitive information by assigning employees passwords on a need-to-know basis is a step in the right direction." This precaution in and of itself, however was not enough. The court was "troubled by the failure to either require employees to sign confidentiality agreements, advise employees that its records were confidential, or label the information as confidential." There was insufficient evidence in the record to show the employees understood the information to be confidential, thus the trial court's finding that the customer lists were not trade secrets was not against the manifest weight of the evidence. [Schneier on Security] Right: what counts as reasonable expectation that others will know it's a secret? This is important. (If you're in my Ethics for Cyberspace class and reading this, then pay attention, and think about it in the context of the course and our recent discussion. First one to remark on it in our online space wins . . . oh, I don't know . . . something virtual.) 10:43:51 PM    comment []

philg: B-school "hacking" incident finally fades from the news No reporters have called in the last couple of weeks to ask about the Harvard Business School "hacking" incident, in which applicants who edited URLs could discover whether or not they'd been admitted.  I had a tough time understanding why the story had such long legs when, after all, quite a few Web sites over the past 15 years have had similar vulnerabilities.  What was unusual about the business schools is that they blamed their Web site users.  Every other publisher has secretly spanked its programmers, patched the hole, and tried to pretend that it never happened.  The B-schools, however, somehow came up with the innovative idea of blaming everything on the cut-and-pasters out there in the wider world rather than on the dazed-by-donuts coders who couldn't get the authorizations right for various pages.  That's what made the story different and what attracted so much press. [This was not actually the first time that HBS had trouble with the world of commercial junkware.  They outsourced their placement office interview scheduling a few years back and the system managed to screw up students desperate for jobs in a down economy.  The student newspaper ran a cartoon lampooning the administrators responsible and the deans decided to fix the problem by threatening to expel the editor of the newspaper for violating Harvard's speech code (see http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/4909.html).] 10:39:26 PM    comment []

Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy. The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy is a new (or at least new to me) online journal being edited by Andrei Marmor, James Dreier, Julia Driver and David Esltund. Here are the theee papers currently on the site. The Myth of Instrumental Rationality by Joseph Raz The paper distinguishes between instrumental reasons and instrumental rationality. It argues that instrumental reasons are not reasons to take the… The Government Beguiled Me: The Entrapment Defense and the Problem of Private Entrapment by Gideon Yaffe Defendants who are being tried for accepting a temptation issued by the government sometimes employ the entrapment defense. Acquittal of some of… Two Approaches to Instrumental Rationality and Belief Consistency by John Brunero R. Jay Wallace argues that the normativity of instrumental rationality can be traced to the independent rational requirement to hold consistent… [Thoughts Arguments and Rants] 10:34:26 PM    comment []

Identity Thieves' Secret Weapon. Consumers, not data dealers, deserve controlling interest in their vital information. [NYT > Opinion] 10:31:32 PM    comment []

Iran eases its social strictures. In a political trade-off, leaders loosen harsh rules. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories] 6:19:49 PM    comment []

iPotus update.  More suggestions for iPod One. (thanks, Barbara)[rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog] 7:38:35 AM    comment []

Gordon Moore looks back, and forward, 40 years. Forty years after he coined the most famous law in computing, Gordon Moore still has a few words of advice for the industry. [InfoWorld: Top News] 7:38:23 AM    comment []

Green building worthy investment for school. At a recent press conference, Webster University President Richard Meyers revealed that the university is considering purchasing the Luhr Library, across the street on the campus of Eden Theological Seminary, for use as a new science building. Certainly, additional classroom buildings should be a priority for the university, and our existing science facilities on the ground level of Webster Hall are anything but impressive. [The Journal] 7:37:52 AM    comment []

BBC Creative Archive launches, without DRM The BBC Creative Archive, a project to clear and distribute all of the material in the BBC's vaults, has offcically launched -- DRM-free, too! Will the Creative Archive use DRM? The Creative Archive will not be using DRM around the content. The BBC's pilot site will be using a technology called GEOIP filtering to ensure that content sourced directly from the BBC will only be available to UK citizens. Will I be able to get old Dr Who episodes? Sadly you will not be able to get old Dr Who episodes in the early days of the Creative Archive. However, it is hoped that the BBC will in time be able to expand its contribution to the Creative Archive to include programmes from all genres. Link (via Wonderland) [bOing bOing] BBC Rips, Mixes Creative Commons (Donna Wentworth). The BBC/Channel 4/Open University/British Film Institute "creative archive" license I wrote about this past weekend launches today, and the website is now online: Creative Archive License Group. The license is of course derived from the Creative Commons licenses, and the website looks like a mod-version of the CC site, complete with adorable icons. So the BBC and co. have themselves followed the advice they give in the project tagline: "Find it. Rip it. Mix it. Share it. Come and get it." [Copyfight] 7:37:36 AM    comment []

research blogging as writing in the moment. Another interesting blog post, with several threads of good-looking conversations to follow, that I don’t have time to read now: Chutry writes about how blogs are a kind of writing to the moment (like epistolary novels) and how that might work in relation to research blogging. What does it mean to write research to the moment rather than writing to a database or a notebook for later editing? This is a really old post, June 2003, which I happened on following a trail of links and trackbacks, and I only just realised it was two years old. I like that two year old posts can be just as visible as new ones. Filed under:blog theorising [jill/txt] 7:32:30 AM    comment []

CFP news: Surveillance Works Both Ways. What happens when the watchers become the watched? They don't like it much. Kim Zetter reports from Seattle. [Wired News] 7:29:52 AM    comment []