Very thorough and interesting paper from Eugene Volokh on Crime-facilitating speech – that is, where (and how) do you draw the line between free speech and speech that should be banned because it facilitates crime. Many examples, from flashing your lights to warn approaching cars about a speed control to publishing nuclear secrets.
I particulary enjoyed the up-to-date references to computer technology and software – there aren’t many law professors (and even fewer regulators) who can discuss law and technology to this level.
An interesting aspect here might be how the revlution in information access changes the rules – since anything published can be instantly found on the Internet (thus removing obscurity as a defence), this would argue for a limitation of certain rights of speech. On the other hand, rapid publishing might be a good defence against evolving crime – such as publishing software insecurities so users can block them, which will also alert criminals and expose the users who don’t block immediately to an increased risk.
Anyway, I never thought I would see the term “script kiddies” in a serious academic paper, especially in law, so this was welcome.
(Via Ed Felten)

Bruce Schneier, renowned cryptography and security expert, has had personal experience of plagiarism, by three Pakistani academics in, of all things, an ACM publication. The reaction of ACM – seemingly, they have no policy about plagiarism and therefore cannot ban the authors from submitting again – seems rather strange to me.
I have some experience with plagiarism, though mostly by students. When teaching at night school some years ago, I caught half a class in plagiarizing, with some students expelled as a result – and I wrote a letter to CACM about the experience. In those days I had to sift through Lexis/Nexis to find the copied text.
Times have changed. At the Norwegian School of Management, we have started to run student papers through a tool called SafeAssignment which seems to work well – it gives me as a teacher a score for plagiarism for each paper submitted (matched against anything on the Web + all papers previously submitted to SafeAssignment). The match is “fuzzy”, and catches even those students who thought they could get things in by changing a just a few words.
Most of the effect is probably preventive – students refrain from plagiarizing for fear of being caught. But I have caught students plagiarizing with this tool and have also used it for control of suspicious papers. It is much less work-intensive than the “pick a prominent sentence and Google it” technique, and seems to catch most copying. Of course, you have to manually check every suspicious paper, since the score can be driven up by quite legitimate quoting.
But why stop at students? I think (as an ACM member and author) that ACM should institute as a policy that they run all received submissions through a tool like Turnitin or SafeAssignment – this will immediately catch flagrant plagiarism such as the one reported by Bruce. In fact, it would be a fun excercise to run all ACMs published papers through a plagarism tool – or, why not, every academic paper ever published….
Google’s strategy is to “organize the world’s information”. Eliminating plagiarism would be an interesting advancement of that strategy – after all, plagiarized material does not really add information, except about the plagiarizer. In the long run, we should have everything back to first normal form, with no copies – just links…..
(And yes, parts of this text is plagiarized from my own comment in Bruce’s blog. At least I acknowledge it, and have extended it….)

I think this goes for most meetings:

“[…] a […] faculty meeting is not over when everything has been said, it is only over when everything has been said by everyone. By my count, we’re about 2/3 done with the first criteria but only about 1/4 done with the latter.”

Not that I am not guilty of spurious (and oh so well formed) rambling overspecifications myself.
From ProfessorBainbridge.com via Infectious Greed.