Would You Like that iPhone Locked or Unlocked?: Reconciling Apple's Anticircumvention Measures with the DMCA

When Apple's iPhone first hit the stores it was an epochal media event.2 Apple, long a leader in high-end computers and personal electronics, was poised to make its entry into a highly-competitive market with a new mobile phone that promised groundbreaking technological capabilities in a sleek, ergonomic package. Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, extolled the iPhone's virtues to an eager press, and, shortly thereafter, Apple's stock jumped dramatically.3 Apple's loyal devotees lined up in anticipation days before the phone's June 29, 2007 release.4 It took Apple a mere seventy-four days to sell one million handsets.5 But some time after the fanfare had settled down, public perception of the iPhone shifted. As consumers began to use the iPhone, the once-beloved phone began to acquire its share of discontents. Consumers expressed frustration in response to 300-page phone bills,6 expensive roaming charges,7 and, perhaps most vocally, to the technological methods Apple used to police its exclusive agreement with AT&T

E-learning – Who? What? Where?

This paper considers case studies of experience in distance-learning environments from the UK's Open University, two having successfully utilised e-learning, and a third which is at the proposal stage, requiring e-learning facilities which are not yet well-developed. Some of the lessons learned are described and the potential role of the world-wide web briefly assessed. The paper also considers how a future strategy for collaboration amongst East and West European Universities and commercial organisations might be developed

Online Communities: Networks That Nurture Long-Distance Relationships and Local Ties

Presents findings from a survey conducted between January and February 2001. Examines two kinds of communities -- cyber-based communities, and those who use the Internet to connect with groups based in the community in which they live

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer by John Markoff (New York: Penguin, 2005)

What the Dormouse Said is the revisionary back- story of Silicon Valley; in particular, the roots of the current model of human interface with personal com- puters (video screen, keyboard, mouse) and the early stabs at creating the Internet. Markoff is a long-standing hi-tech reporter for the New York Times who, over the past 20 years, has co-written three computer-related books. In Dormouse, his fourth book (but first solo effort), he takes us back to the pre-ironic age — ‘‘the Flintstones era of computers’’ — when batch processing and beatniks still roamed the earth. His claim is that the various accounts of the birth of personal computing have failed to attend sufficiently to the significance of the unique social milieu of San Francisco-area culture of the 1960s. There is much debate, not to mention much confused popular memory, over what the essence of the 1960s was, but in Markoff’s view, it was characterized by a bohemian sensibility that was open to experiments in alternative living arrangements, a disposition to anti- establishment politics (especially opposition to the military-industrial complex and its war in Vietnam), and a willingness to experiment with altered psychic states, especially through ingesting and inhaling certain substances. More fundamentally, in Markoff’s slightly elegiac account of the period, what was shared by the hippies and the personal computing pioneers based in and around Stanford was a commitment to transforming the world and the nature of humanity in a fundamental way — bringing about a change that hadn’t come before

Is Internet Exceptionalism Dead?

Is there such a thing as Internet exceptionalism? If so, just what is the Internet an exception to? It may appear technical, but this is actually one of the big questions of our generation, for the Internet has shaped the United States and the world over the last twenty years in ways people still struggle to understand. The question is not merely academic. The greatest Internet firms can be succinctly defined as those that have best understood what makes the Internet different

Privacy and Confidentiality in an e-Commerce World: Data Mining, Data Warehousing, Matching and Disclosure Limitation

The growing expanse of e-commerce and the widespread availability of online databases raise many fears regarding loss of privacy and many statistical challenges. Even with encryption and other nominal forms of protection for individual databases, we still need to protect against the violation of privacy through linkages across multiple databases. These issues parallel those that have arisen and received some attention in the context of homeland security. Following the events of September 11, 2001, there has been heightened attention in the United States and elsewhere to the use of multiple government and private databases for the identification of possible perpetrators of future attacks, as well as an unprecedented expansion of federal government data mining activities, many involving databases containing personal information. We present an overview of some proposals that have surfaced for the search of multiple databases which supposedly do not compromise possible pledges of confidentiality to the individuals whose data are included. We also explore their link to the related literature on privacy-preserving data mining. In particular, we focus on the matching problem across databases and the concept of ``selective revelation'' and their confidentiality implications.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000240 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org