Category Archives: Internet

Cute Election-Day Web App

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

The NYT offers 512 Paths to the White House — a cute online app in which you choose how you think key swing states will come out and it tells you what other states the candidates have to get in order to win.

Give Romney Florida, and Obama Ohio, and then see just how many states Romney still needs to win. Basically if Obama takes Virginia OR Wisconsin plus any one of NC, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, he wins (except that New Hampshire + Wisconsin is a tie, which means the House will pick Romney).

A little morning fun, and a way to keep track as the results come in. Spotted via Talk Left.

Posted in 2012 Election, Internet | Comments Off on Cute Election-Day Web App

Big Brother is WWWatching You (feat. George Orwell)

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

Rap News 15:

Good stuff! Lots of cute in-jokes too.

Spotted via BoingBoing.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Cryptography, Internet, Law: Privacy | Comments Off on Big Brother is WWWatching You (feat. George Orwell)

That’s a New One

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

Visiting the New York Times online dining section in order to link to What Restaurants Know (About You) for my seminar on ‘Regulation of Identification’, I get this popup:

Google has disabled use of the Maps API for this application. This site is not authorized to use the Google Maps client id provided. If you are the owner of this application, you can learn more about registering URLs here: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/business/guide#URLs

Coding error? NYT not paying its bill? The message popped up at the front page of a section, so it’s hard to see the NYT failing to have registered it.

Posted in Internet | 1 Comment

Yes, Assange Would Be Safer in Sweden

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

One thing that always comes up when I discuss WikiLeaks with other lawyers, whatever country they may be from, is shared incredulity at Assange’s claim that he faces a great risk of hypothetical extradition to the US from Sweden, or that his risk would be greater there than in the UK…especially given that when it comes to extradition to the US, the UK has to be in the running for Top Poodle. But what do I know about Swedish law?

Thus, it it is reassuring and unsurprising to find a quality analysis of the Swedish legal rules relating to any hypothetical extradition request. And, no, according to Klamberg on Extraditing Assange from Sweden to the U.S. Assange wouldn’t seem to have much to worry about.

Which leads suspicious minds to wonder if perhaps there isn’t some other reason why Assange doesn’t want to be extradited to Sweden?

Posted in Internet, Law: International Law | 4 Comments

Slides From my P3P Talk

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

I thought I would post the slides from my P3P talk. I’m not sure if I will write this up into a paper. On the one hand, there’s really nothing surprising in what I’m saying here. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be a paper out there that directly addresses the topic, so there would at least be some point in writing it up.

A. Michael Froomkin, Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P): Lessons Learnt for Privacy Standards (Oslo, Aug. 21, 2012).

I’ve also attempted to embed the files, but that doesn’t seem to be working out….

[gview file=”http://staticd.discourse.net/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/P3P-talk-Froomkin-021.pptx”]

Posted in Internet, Talks & Conferences | Comments Off on Slides From my P3P Talk

Xmarks is Back

Posted on July 1, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

Xmarks is back. I found this on their twitter feed:

We experienced unscheduled downtime, we apologize for the inconvenience. Please try a “repair” for ongoing errors: http://bit.ly/MlqXKf

Which leads you to this ‘perfect storm’ explanation:

Xmarks bookmark sync has experienced unscheduled downtime over the last 20 hours. This morning the decision was made to disable syncing to facilitate recovery.

Xmarks has gone to backups to restore the service for impacted Xmarks bookmark sync users. If you use Xmarks bookmark sync please double check any bookmarks you’ve made over the previous 48 hours from 7/1/2012.

At this stage all users should be back in working order from the server, if you’re having issues we’d recommend trying Xmarks Settings -> Advanced -> Repair first. You may want to consider simply using Upload instead to push your local set up to the server if you notice inconsistencies.

If you use Firefox you can reference the bookmarks backups that Firefox automatically creates: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Backing_up_and_restoring_bookmarks_-_Firefox

A number of issues came together causing Xmarks to experience this problem:

– While our datacenters were not impacted, our staff was impacted by the storms that hit the Washington DC area – leaving many of our employees without power, without Internet, and without working phones.
– Our offices are also without power impacted by the storms so using them was not a possibility either.
– Nearly all of our servers were impacted by the bug detailed by Mozilla here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=769972
– We found that rebooting machines fixed the issue before we found out the true cause (and the above bug report). Rebooting worked but a number of machines failed to shutdown gracefully causing issues bringing back up the cluster cleanly.

We apologize for this issue and thank you for your patience. We will be looking into ways we can further mitigate our risks against threats like these in the future.

That Firefox bug, by the way is ‘Java is choking on leap second‘. That plus a major power outage is very very bad luck indeed. The leap second bug had some nasty effets around the world — grounding Qantas flights and crashing various internet services.

Previously: Xmarks is Down.

Posted in Internet, Software | 1 Comment