Senate Postpones INDUCE Markup
C-net News.com reports that the Senate committee vote on the Induce Act scheduled for today has been postponed. Additional coverage here.
CRA Government Affairs
ACM Adopts Policy on E-Voting
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaFrom the ACM [a CRA affiliate organization] press release: New York, September 27, 2004 — Seeking to bolster the security, accessibility, and public confidence in the voting process, ACM’s elected leadership has approved a public statement on the deployment and use of computer-based electronic voting (e-voting) systems for public elections. ACM’s position is that while […]
INDUCE Could Find Its Way Into Spending Bill
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaReuters reports that Senate backers of the INDUCE Act — including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Minority Leader Tom Daschle — may attempt to attach the bill to a must-pass spending bill in an effort to secure passage for the controversial (and ill-conceived) legislation. The Senate Judiciary Committee could take up the bill on […]
Fixing a Busted IT Research System
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaCRA Chair Jim Foley sat for an extended interview with CNET News.com on the state of the IT research enterprise in the US. Here’s the intro: James Foley is worried. As chairman of the Computing Research Association–a group made up of academic departments, research centers and professional societies–his job at CRA is to improve computing […]
Congress Should Slow Down on New Copyright Regs, USACM Says
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaThe U.S. Public Policy Committee of ACM — one of CRA’s affiliate organizations — has joined a broad coalition of groups who have written (pdf) to the members of the US Senate urging them to “slow down” their efforts to pass legislation (called INDUCE) that would create a new form of secondary liability for copyright […]
Court Rules 3rd Party Garage Door Openers Don’t Violate DMCA
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaIn an affirmation of fair use rights — at least, as long as they don’t conflict with any other rights — a federal court ruled yesterday that a company that makes interoperable remotes for other companies’ garage door openers isn’t violating federal copyright law. The law in question is the troublesome Digital Millenium Copyright Act […]
Nuturing Innovation
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaJust a quick pointer to two interesting posts on innovation on Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker blog. Nurturing Innovation Nurturing Innovation II Here’s a good bit: Internet email was invented in 1971. Back then, could you have found even one single person in Washington who would point to this fledgling technology as one day being […]
Elections Chairman Thanks Computer Scientists for Work Raising E-voting Concerns
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaWired covers remarks by DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly formed federal Election Assistance Commission, praising computer scientists for calling attention to security problems with e-voting machines and for helping develop new standards for building machines that might be more secure in the future. CRA’s affiliate organization the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) […]
JetBlue Disclosure Didn’t Violate Federal Law
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaAn update to a story we mentioned way back in January, the Army’s inspector general found that an Army data-mining project using data offered by JetBlue and a private data broker didn’t violate federal privacy rules. This may say more about the need to update federal privacy rules than it does about the privacy implications […]
Tech Firms Want More Female Computer Whizzes
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaGreat article in US News and World Report on the “corporate wake up call” regarding the participation of women in computer science. CRA’s Jan Cuny (and CRA’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W)) gets a nice mention. Here’s a sample: That sense of isolation and inadequacy is one reason the number […]
