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I told students I had just attended a lecture on copyright (part of a meeting at DIMACS), and told them of the assertion by the speaker that copyright was essentially dead, and would be replaced by pricing decisions and contract law (with "consumers" agreeing with "providers" on restrictions).
I began by discussing MP3's. Most students were familiar with this. I then mentioned SDMI, the Secure Digital Music Initiative, which was supposed to be introduced six months ago. It was an encryption scheme. Then I discussed the DVD attacks on CSS, the content scrambling system, and its breaking. I was wearing my DeCSS t-shirt, which I displayed. Encryption can be clumsy and time-consuming, and this encryption wasn't very good.
Then I discussed steganography: digital watermarking. This can have the advantage of being passive, with embedded ownership and use and copying permissions. A handout [PDF|PS|TeX] discussed the protection of digital intellectual property by both cryptography and steganography. I asked people how to "flip bits" in the bitstorm picture in a not very noticeable way. I remarked that in reality people would do other bit-flipping (inserting noise) just to conceal the deliberate alterations.
I told them that we would discuss DES next time, and referred them to the DES web page for the course. I reinforced this with the following e-mail message:
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The homework for Wednesday is to investigate DES. So begin by looking
at the web page
http://math.rutgers.edu/~greenfie/currentcourses/math103spring/des.html (or just go to the course web page and click on "The DES assignment"). I hope that students in this course will be able to read some of the material related to DES and think about it critically. Therefore I ask you to spend some time BEFORE Wednesday reading and thinking about the discussion questions which are on the web page. I want to talk about the technical "stuff" a bit (Mr. Radomirovic will help!). But you should form some ideas about what DES is, what it represented socially and politically, how it is now, and what's proposed to replace it. DES isn't theoretical cryptography but represents the reality of government interaction with broader aspects of society. Come equipped with facts and opinions, please. After the discussion, everyone will be asked to write a short paper about some aspect of DES. |
I gave out a half page on the DES writing assignment [PDF|PS|TeX]. It was graced by a short Calvin & Hobbes script which basically discussed the incomprehensibility of academic writing.
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