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Readings

There are various kinds of readings listed here: Required books, handouts, recommended books, articles, websites. We will from time to time add required or suggested readings to the course schedule; everything is assembled here in one place just for convenience. Some of the links require a Harvard ID# and PIN not because they are proprietary but simply because they are most easily available to Harvard students through Harvard's Lexis-Nexis server or the Harvard Library Electronic Resources server.

Required book

This is available at the Coop.

  1. Abelson, Ledeen, Lewis, Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion.

Course Notes

We will supply supplemental handouts on the quantitative aspects of the course.

Recommended books

  1. Lessig, Lawrence, Code and other Laws of Cyberspace (v. 2.0). Also available as free download. The strange and troubling tale of how information is becoming less free just as the technology to distribute it is flourishing.
  2. Lessig, Lawence, The Future of Ideas. A bleak picture of a world in which corporations will own most of the products of human creativity. Also available as a free download.
  3. O'Harrow, Robert, No Place to Hide, Free Press. The pros and cons of the new world in which no one can hide so that terrorists cannot hide.
  4. Singh, Simon, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, Anchor, ISBN 385495323. Well-told tales of cryptography through the ages. The class notes are better on the technical detail but Singh's storytelling is compellingly romantic.

Other good books

  1. Litman, Jessica, Digital Copyright, Prometheus, 2001, ISBN 1-57392-889-5.
  2. Spar, Debora, Ruling the Waves: From the Compass to the Internet, a History of Business and Politics along the Technological Frontier, Harvest/HBJ, ISBN 015602702X. The cycles in the development and deployment of communications technologies are strangely repetitive over the course of history. Professor Spar teaches at HBS and will be giving a guest lecture in the course. Excellent book, unfortunately now out of print so it has been moved to the recommended list.
  3. Stephenson, Neil, Cryptonomicon, Avon, 1999.
  4. Vaidhyanathan, Siva, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System, Basic, 2004.
  5. Vaidhyanathan, Siva, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, NYU, 2003, ISBN 0814788076.
  6. Neumann, Peter G., Computer-Related Risks, Addison-Wesley, 1995.
  7. Glieck, James, What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier, Pantheon; 2002, ISBN: 0375421777.
  8. Lessig, Lawrence, Free Culture, free download of full text, also Penguin, 2004, ISBN 1594200068.
  9. Brooks, Frederick P., Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition, 2/E, Addison-Wesley, 1995, ISBN 0-201-83595-9. First published in 1975, an amazingly durable and readable piece of wisdom about why computer programs are hard to write.
  10. von Baeyer, Hans Christian, Information : The New Language of Science, Harvard University Press, 2004, ISBN 0674013875.More about science and less about communication and intellectual property than Bits.
  11. Galloway, Alexander R., Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, MIT Press, 2004, ISBN 0-262-07247-5. A pessimistic view of the Internet as a force for freedom.
  12. Moschovitis, Christos J. P., et al., History of the Internet: A Chronology, 1843 to the Present, ABC-Clio, 1999, ISBN 1576071189.
  13. Brin, David, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, Perseus, 1998.
  14. Alderman, Ellen, and Kennedy, Caroline, The Right to Privacy, Vintage, 1977, ISBN 0679744347.
  15. Schneier, Bruce, Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, Wiley, 2000, ISBN 0471253111.

Articles

  1. Moore, Gordon, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits (pdf), Electronics, 38, 8 (April 19, 1965). The original "Moore's law" paper. A 2003 update by Intel on the progress of Moore's Law.
  2. Shannon, Claude. A Mathematical Theory of Communication (pdf), Bell Systems Technical Journal, 1948. The original paper. He even explains on the first page what bits are, since no one had ever heard of them at that point.
  3. Wolf, Gary, The Great Library of Amazonia, Wired, October 23, 2003. Amazon's on-line library, since dwarfed by Google's initiative.
  4. The Physics of the Web (somewhat technical). The web is found to be about 19 clicks "across."
  5. IP over Avian Carrier. A joke, in the style of the "RFCs" [Requests for Comments] used to develop protocol standards.
  6. A good but long paper about property rights in radio spectrum by Milton Mueller (1982).
  7. Why the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) standard used in wireless communication is actually insecure.
  8. Lessig on recording commercial phone calls (pdf).
  9. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA)
  10. A scary decision, US vs. Councilman, (pdf) concluding that ISPs can read your email and a brief by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (pdf) appealing that decision.
  11. An MIT student paper about spread spectrum regulation.
  12. Location tracking via cell phone E911 (Wired).
  13. Olmstead v. United States, an important 1928 wiretap case.
  14. Katz v. United States, another important wiretap case, from 1967.
  15. The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header, another joke RFC, this one about encryption.
  16. The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, & Trusted Third Party Encryption, a 1998 paper by a distinguished group of computer scientists arguing against government regulation of encryption.
  17. John Perry Barlow on the Clipper Chip: Electrosphere: Jackboots on the Infobahn (1993)
  18. Matt Blaze, Cryptology and Physical Security: Rights Amplification in Master-Keyed Mechanical Locks (pdf). How to make a master key from a single lock, a single key that opens it, and a few blanks (offered for philosophical reasons only, please don't do this!) A paper that could not legally be published if it described electronic locks rather than physical locks.
  19. The full text of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), 1998.
  20. Lawrence Tribe, The Constitution in Cyberspace, 1991.
  21. Esther Dyson, Intellectual Value (Wired, 1995).
  22. Gottschalk v. Benson, 409 U.S. 63 (1972). The Supreme Court decision that established that a program was not patentable, since it was merely an algorithm.
  23. Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981). The Supreme Court decision that established the opposite principle in the case of a program implementing a process for curing rubber.
  24. Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure. A Clinton-era 250-page "white paper" giving a broad and pointed review of intellectual property law in the digital age.
  25. Jessica Litman, Revising Copyright Law for the Information Age. A harsh critique of the White Paper.
  26. John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (1996).
  27. A 1996 article by Anne Branscomb on issues in cyberspace law: Cyberspaces: Familiar territory or lawless frontiers. Classifies possible legal issues without going into any in great depth.
  28. Richard Stallman, Why Software Should be Free (1992) and The Free Software Definition.
  29. John Perry Barlow, The Economy of Ideas (Wired, 1994).
  30. John Perry Barlow, The Next Economy of Ideas (Wired, 2000).
  31. Steven Levy, "Battle of the Clipper Chip," New York Times Magazine, June 12, 1994.
  32. Promoting Innovation and Economic Growth: The Special Problem of Digital Intellectual Property (73 pages, pdf), a 2004 report by the Digital Connections Council of the Committee for Economic Development, and "Report raises questions about fighting online piracy," a quick take on the report by John Schwartz of the NewYork Times, March 1, 2004.
  33. Constance L. Hays, "What They Know About You," New York Times,November 14, 2004. "They" are Wal-Mart.
  34. Kevin Rothstein, "Eyes on Kids," Boston Herald, November 14, 2004.Tracking Boston school buses.
  35. Hiawatha Bray, "Music industry aims to send in radio cops," Boston Globe, November 15, 2004.
  36. Gardiner Harris, "Tiny antennas to keep tabs on US drugs," New York Times, November 15, 2004. RFIDs on pill bottles.
  37. From IEEE Spectrum, July 2003. They know where you are: New technologies can pinpoint your location at any time and place. They promise safety and convenience—but threaten privacy and security.
  38. FCC clarifies that they do, in fact, control everything, Kurt Mackey. Contains links to briefs in dispute about FCC's authority to require video recording equipment to respect broadcast flag.
  39. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine (PDF), by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1997. Two Stanford graduate students describe what would become Google.
  40. "'Loyalty cards' mean no privacy in store," Thomas M. Keane, Boston Herald, March 12, 2004.
  41. "New High-tech Passports Raise Concerns of Snooping," Matthew L. Wald, New York Times, November 26, 2004.
  42. "The cordless phone tries to catch up to its cool cousin," Ian Austen, The New York Times, November 25, 2004. Spread spectrum for cordless phones.
  43. "A federal proposal to keep data on all college students raises questions of privacy, Diana Jean Schemo, New York Times, November 29, 2004.
  44. "ACLU's search for data on donors stirs privacy fears," Stephanie Strom, New York Times, December 18, 2004.
  45. "A trademark infringement suit against Google may alter how the search industry makes a profit," Nat Ives, The New York Times, December 13, 2004.
  46. Mark Rasch, Computer security: Legal Lessons in the Computer Age. Rasch is director of information securly law and policy at the Center for Information Protection at SAIC, a major security consulting firm. He will be a guest lecturer in the course.
  47. Mark Stefik, Trusted Systems (PDF), Scientific American, March 1977, 78-81. (Downloading Scientific Amercian articles requires a Harvard ID# and PIN.)
  48. Philip R. Zimmermann, Computer Security and the Internet (PDF), Scientific American, October 1998, 110-115.
  49. Ronald L. Rivest, The case against regulating encryption technology (PDF), Scientific American, October 1998, 116-117.
  50. Roy Want, RFID: A key to automating everything (PDF), Scientific American, January 2004, 56-65.
  51. David R. Hughes and Dwayne Hendricks, Spread-spectrum radio (PDF), Scientific American, April 1998, 94-96.
  52. Wendy M. Grossman, Radio space: A renegade plan to show that spectrum isn't scarce (PDF), Scientific American, September 2002, 29.
  53. Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Oral Lassila, The Semantic Web (PDF), Scientific American, May 2001, 43-52.
  54. Ken C. Pohlmann, Music Wars (PDF), Scientific American, November 2000, 57-61.
  55. Bob Driehaus, How it happened, Cincinnati Post, December 28, 2004. The failure of the Comair computer system, which grounded the airline over Christmas, was due to software that used only 16 bits for the number of crew schedule changes in a month. December was an unexpectedly bad month for changes, and a day or two before Christmas the number exceeded 32,767, the largest positive number that can be represented in 16 bits.
  56. Patent 5,533,051, Method for Data Compression. (Patents can be looked up on the US Patent and Trademark Office Website.) This patent seems to offer compression of arbitrary data.
  57. US Patent 5,806,063, Date formatting and sorting for dates spanning the turn of the century. This algorithm is: Given a two-digit date "XY", if XY≥50 then Year="19XY", if XY<50 then Year="20XY". If you are using that algorithm you are supposed to pay this guy.
  58. An official statement about downloading issued by Professor Lewis back when he was Dean Lewis, and The dean of downloading, a take on that statement by the Harvard Independent.
  59. Harry R. Lewis, Tales from the Chad Box, Fifteen Minutes (Harvard Crimson Magazine); December 7, 2000. Nostalgia about the good ol' days of computing when bits were palpable.
  60. A Harvard biochemistry researcher faces prosecution in France for cracking software security.
  61. Hacker breaks into T-Mobile Network (AP Newswire), Boston Herald, January 13, 2005.
  62. Online search engines help lift cover of privacy, Yuki Noguchi, Washington Post, February 9, 2004.
  63. John Schwartz, Graduate Cryptographers Unlock Code of 'Thiefproof' Car Key, New York Times, January 29, 2005. The whole story is in a web site cited below.
  64. Tom Zeller, Jr., Federal effort to head off TV piracy is challenged, New York Times, February 21, 2005. (2/21/05: This Link will work for a few days; if it is dead, you will have to use Lexis-Nexis.)
  65. The original spread spectrum patent (pdf) by Hedy Lamarr.

Web Sites

  1. How much information is there? Berkeley web site.
  2. How Do Compact Disks Work? Mike Mayer.
  3. Internet Mapping Project (neat maps of the Internet, but already more than five years old), a paper (pdf) about how those maps are made, and some maps of the Internet backbone.
  4. A short lexicon of networking terms.
  5. How VoIP works.
  6. A once-over-lightly from NASA about the different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
  7. A simple explanation of location tracking.
  8. RSA's description of Diffie-Hellman.
  9. A quick description of a few kinds of encryption.
  10. A quick explanation of quantum encryption.
  11. The Unicode web site.On beyond zebra.
  12. A Gallery of CSS Descramblers maintained by Prof. David Touretsky of Carnegie Mellon University. CSS is the "Content Scrambling System" used to encrypt digital video disks; even explaining how to descramble CSS is said to be illegal under DMCA, even if the explainer never does it.This site links to several of the legal documents, though some of the links are broken.
  13. A Wikipedia article about Digital Rights Management.
  14. How Microsoft Windows Media Rights Management works.
  15. Creative Commons web site
  16. Electronic Frontier Foundation
  17. The official inventory of RFCs ("Requests ofr Comments"), which define the Internet standards.
  18. Chilling effects
  19. uLocate: "Improve Family Efficiency - Safety ­ Peace of Mind - Receive alerts when family members arrive or depart from home, school, or the office"
  20. Center for Democracy and Technology. A civil liberties organization in the computer and communication technology space. Links to ongoing legislative action.
  21. Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
  22. The Motion Picture Assocation of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America. Home pages of both organizations are now mostly devoted to issues of copyright and downloading.
  23. MIT 6.805 readings and source material. This is the website of readings from an MIT course - it has a large number of links and some excellent brief summaries, especially of modern encryption technology and the resulting tensions national security and personal freedom.
  24. The GNU General Public License (GPL)
  25. Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia. Somewhat technical definitions of lots of Internet terminology.
  26. Case study on Doubleclick
  27. File Transfer Speed Calculator, a commercial site, from the company Vision Graphics, that calculates the time needed to transfer files of various sizes at various bit rates.
  28. Endangered Gizmos, a list of devices and software which have been threatened by legal and regulatory measures because their use is considered threatening by content industries.
  29. Analysis of the Texas Instruments DST RFID. The whole story on cracking car keys with 40-bit encryption.
  30. Whatroute, a free downloadable graphic demo of routing within the Internet.
  31. Story about court decision on the broadcast flag.
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