200 Deeplinks at EFF
The article I published about the (qualified) public domain victory in the Happy Birthday case this week was my 200th post on EFF’s blog Deeplinks, an event that—like the 100th post two years ago—calls for a little reflection. I’ve picked out some of my favorites in posts 101-200, below.
In Pushing For Perfect Forward Secrecy, an Important Web Privacy Protection, I worked with our tech folks to explain a property that actually really matters for cryptography, but at that point—in August 2013—hadn’t really been set out for lay people. Since then it’s been described even better, but for a while this post had the honor of being one of the more widely-shared explainers on the topic.
The post In the Silk Road Case, Don’t Blame the Technology was published the day the criminal complaint against Ross Ulbricht was released. It goes through some of the technologies that he was alleged to have used, talking about how essential they are for enabling important speech, and how they’ve been demonized before.
It’s more specialized, but Mobile Tracking Code of Conduct Falls Short of Protecting Consumers was a fun combination of legal and technical talk. One of the points I got to make in there was how the space of MAC address hashes is possible to brute force, alongside general concerns about people finding retail mobile tracking creepy.
Remembering Aaron was a difficult one to write, emotionally. It’s become an important thing for me to look over the work I’m doing, and see how it lines up with his ideals. This post was a chance to do that across the whole organization, and speculate what he might have thought about the developments in this space in the year since his death.
There’s maybe no post that I hope more will be vindicated by history than How a Bad Supreme Court Decision Could Have Good Constitutional Consequences for Copyright, which is basically a short look at a law review article by Neil Netanel arguing that the Golan decision could render 1201 a violation of the First Amendment.
A pair of articles about TPP written 18 months apart are favorites for different reasons. The TPP’s Attack on Artists’ Termination Rights was the first thing I co-wrote with Sarah Jeong, and was both obviously correct and intensely aggravating to people who set up camp on “the other side” of copyright issues from EFF. TPP’s Copyright Trap is a long look at copyright terms that is one of the most widely shared things I’ve written.
Finally, Who Really Owns Your Drones? is so far my most thorough look at one of The Big Questions about DRM and connected devices. It builds on earlier posts like How DRM Harms Our Computer Security and that weird news story from February about the drone downed on the White House lawn.