Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Monday April 18, 2005
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 230
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served

Board a city bus, pass a bank building, or drive through a toll point - these are just a few ways that your daily trip to and from work can create a record about you in a database or on film. While the anonymity of non-suspicious routine activities is eroding, there is nothing inevitable about this development. This talk will be an overview of some current research projects exploring the grand challenge of today's engineers and IT developers -- integrating privacy and/or anonymity into the design of technology. Three areas of research will be presented. First, a set of privacy design principles for engineers and computer scientists will be presented. Second, in a case study on sharing video surveillance data, a new privacy-enabling algorithm, named k-Same, will also be demonstrated. This algorithm guarantees face recognition software cannot reliably recognize de-identified faces, even though many facial details are preserved. Third is an overview of a mental models approach to help in understanding potential public attitudes and awareness towards privacy and recent changes in technology.Elaine Newton is a doctoral candidate in the Engineering and Public Policy

Monday April 4, 2005
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 180
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served

The opportunities abound for a new and vibrant kind of "citizen's media" --
weblogs, podcasting, video and more -- but the law may thwart this
democratization. In particular, copyright to defamation may become barriers
to the most important shift in media power in generations. Do we need better
defenses, better laws, or both? Dan Gillmor is author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the
People, for the People" (O'Reilly Media, 2004), a book that explains the
rise of citizens' media and why it matters. He is working on a project

Monday March 28, 2005
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 271
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served

Trusted computing architectures attempt to increase trust in networked computing environments. Since a few years, interest in research and implementation of trusted computing technologies has risen considerably. Initiatives such as the Trusted Computing Group, Microsoft's Next Generation Secure Computing Base and Intel's LaGrande could alter the IT infrastructure landscape as we currently know it in considerable ways. This talk describes the fundamental technological concepts on which trusted computing is based and presents an overview of their legal and policy implications. In particular, the talk focuses on the relationship between trusted computing and competition policy, open source software, patent licensing, privacy and copyright law. Furthermore, the talk investigates the value decisions that must be made when designing the infrastructure that surrounds any trusted computing architecture. On a more philosophical level, the talk looks at different approaches to establish trust in networked computing environments as an answer to the increasing complexity of computer networks.Stefan Bechtold graduated from the University of Tuebingen Law School,

Monday March 14, 2005
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 271
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served

Many of the stores and websites defend their huge collections of personal information by arguing that the data is a necessary part of offering personalized, customized service. This assumption is wrong. It is possible to build a database that answers useful questions without keeping any useful information in it. This talk will offer a few demonstrations like:

* a library that thwarts deadbeats without tracking reading habits

* a store that offers almost all of the features of top flight stores like Amazon without keeping any personal information around

Monday March 7, 2005
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 271
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served

In the Information Age, our lives are documented in digital dossiers maintained by hundreds (perhaps thousands) of businesses and government agencies. These dossiers are composed of bits of our personal information, which when assembled together begin to paint a portrait of our personalities. The dossiers are increasingly used to make decisions about our lives – whether we get a loan, a mortgage, a license, or a job; whether we are investigated or arrested; and whether we are permitted to fly on an airplane. After September 11, the government has been increasingly tapping into companies' databases to monitor and profile people.

Monday February 28, 2005
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 180
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served

Monday February 21, 2005
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 180
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served

This talk will look at how the Internet is impacting research and writing in an
academic setting, with particular attention paid the newly created unpublished
public domain. It asks the question of how the digital archiving projects and
e-books projects connect to or impact on the development of the unpublished
public domain. What should scholars know when working with archival and
manuscript sources that are now found on the Internet? What kind of advocacy
or awareness is needed to keep open the spaces of knowledge that scholars use?Elizabeth Townsend Gard holds a Ph.D.

Monday February 14, 2005
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 230
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served

Many patents granted by the government are undeservingly issued. They issue for several reasons, including that the Patent Office is not aware of significant prior art (knowledge already in the public domain) and that the rules regarding how patents are granted are skewed through perverse patent policy to favor applicants. Wrongly issued patents injure the public because they can be, and often are, used by private actors to preclude activity that would otherwise be permissible, if not desirable. This and other failings of our current patent system cause prices for goods to be artificially high, the advancement of science to be thwarted, and civil liberties to be inappropriately restrained.

Monday November 29, 2004
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 230
Free and Open to all!
Lunch will be provided

What makes cyberlaw so special? Its brief history suggests it's the capacity of its technologies to reach multiple audiences who can be creators and tinkerers. Both the PC OS and the Internet are open to and powered by amateurs in a way that other technologies are not, and members of one audience can build technologies on top of existing ones that in turn allow others to continue to build. Cyberlaw's central challenge is to establish ways of thinking about such technologies when their undesirable applications -- and very success -- threaten to undermine the recursive potential of the technologies themselves through, respectively, regulation or entrepreneurial enclosure.Jonathan Zittrain is the Jack N.

Monday November 22, 2004
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 180
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served

The public sector has become a major driver in the adaption of Free Software solutions. The decisions of the municipalities of Munich and Paris to migrate from
Microsoft to Linux are only the most visible examples, while many other government entities worldwide silently follow suit. Some countries even have banned the use of proprietary software within their administrations.

The development as such remains fiercely contended, with proprietary software vendors claiming that their solutions can deliver the same or better quality and