Cryptosmith

If it’s public information on paper, is the electronic version also a public record?

As a techie, I tend to think so. The electronic version carries more information, is easier to work with, and is sometimes easier to authenticate.

The city of Phoenix, AZ, recently argued the opposite in court, and ultimately lost. Someone was suing the city and demanded some public records. The city provided paper copies, some of which appeared to be backdated. The plaintiff demanded the electronic copies so he could examine the metadata. The city refused, saying that the metadata was not public record. Two courts agreed, but the Arizona Supreme Court disagreed. So a court is on record saying that, if the document is a public record, the electronic form is also a public record.

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Apparently someone in the UK has proposed a sort of “three strikes” law – if your household is accused by a copyright holder of illegal downloading multiple times, then the holder can demand removal of the househ0ld’s Internet connection.

Cory Doctorow, the author, wrote a polemic about how this reflects on the big media firms it tries to help.

He notes how copyright owners now use “takedown notices” as an extrajudicial form of censorship. There is no practical defense against such notices: the ISPs are caught in the middle and aren’t inclined to take on such a legal challenge. The Internet has become such a part of modern life that its removal is tantamount to imprisonment.

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I’ve always been a fan of graphic presentations. More people understand graphs and diagrams than understand equations. While this is a bad thing in some ways, it remains a fact. So it’s always great to see a graphical representation of a really difficult set of concepts.

Jeff Moser Fisher has posted A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). He has wisely structured it in layers. Interested readers can learn about AES to their level of interest or understanding: they can get the history and process, the high-level summary, or go diving into S-boxes.

Great!

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