Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Shorter Obama Speech – July 25, 2011

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

“Since nothing else has worked, I’m going to try some mild populism tonight, but I’m still prepared to meet the GOP 90% of the way and enact Hoover-like policies in a recession.”

(Shorter Speaker of the House John Boehner: “Get stuffed.”)

Posted in Politics: US | 1 Comment

My Name is Michael and I’m a Tweaker

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Tweaking may be a disease.

In the quest for speed I’ve moved my very long blogroll from the right margin to a special page of its own, Blogs I Read, and linked to it right under the banner at the top of the page.

This chops almost two more seconds off the load time, at least if the barometric conditions are right.

Just one more thing — really, just one more, honest — that I have to figure out: why, sometimes W3 Total Cache decides to reject the IE user-agent and instead of directing it to the amazon cloud server, sends it to my host instead.

The message (in reveal codes) is

Content Delivery Network via Amazon Web Services: S3: staticd.discourse.net.s3.amazonaws.com (user agent is rejected)

But there’s nothing on the list of user agents to reject that I can see which looks anything like IE. (Full list below the fold).

If you are curious, you can tell which version you got by looking at the source files and searching for “staticd” — if you find it, you got the cloud version; if you didn’t it all came straight from the source. The two versions are supposed to be identical, it’s just a speed issue.

Continue reading →

Posted in Discourse.net | 1 Comment

Bitcoin is Subject to Traffic Analysis

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Bitcoin is not securely anonymous. The publication of all spends creates a data pool that allows a motivated monitor to infer money flow facts about some users, and given the small number of key intermediaries would allow them to infer even more.

This is a straight-forward passive analysis of public data that allows us to de-anonymize considerable portions of the Bitcoin network. We can use tools from network analysis to visualize egocentric networks and to follow the flow of Bitcoins. This can help us identify several centralized services that may have even more details about interesting users. We can also apply techniques such as community finding, block modeling, network flow algorithms, etc. to better understand the network.

An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System: Bitcoin is not Anonymous. Spotted via Slashdot, Bitcoin Is Not Anonymous.

Posted in Cryptography | Comments Off on Bitcoin is Subject to Traffic Analysis

Telex, Coming to a Planet Near You

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

James Grimmelmann’s neat description of the Telex project and its implications is the most interesting thing I’ve read today this week this fortnight in some time.

Must reading for anyone interested in crypto policy, free speech, or internet freedom generally.

Posted in Cryptography, Internet, Law: Free Speech | Comments Off on Telex, Coming to a Planet Near You

Annotating PDFs — the Missing Function?

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

The NYT has an article on a subject I’ve been forced to care about, since my office is now effectively more-or-less paperless (it is actually almost fileless, but for most purposes why have paper if you can’t keep it?): How to live without a printer.

The key recommendation in Getting By Without a Computer Printer is pretty obvious:

You can limit contact with your printer by becoming more familiar with PDFs

But the problem with .pdf’s is that I don’t know how to annotate them. I know how to take notes in the margin of a paper document. How do I replicate this virtually, easily, and visibly on a .pdf?

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 8 Comments

News of the Weird

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

A woman is suing JetBlue for making her prove to them that she was wearing underwear.

The strange thing about this story is that it didn’t happen in Florida.

Oh wait. It was a flight from LaGuardia to Florida. So that’s OK then.

Posted in Law: Right to Travel | Comments Off on News of the Weird