For years, EFF has been warning that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can be used to chill speech, particularly security research, because legitimate researchers will be afraid to publish their results lest they be accused of circumventing a technological protection measure. We've also been concerned that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could be abused to try to make alleged contract violations into crimes.

We've never been sorrier to be right. These two things are precisely what's happening in Sony v. Hotz. If you have missed this one, Sony has sued several security researchers for publishing information about security holes in Sony’s PlayStation 3. At first glance, it's hard to see why Sony is bothering — after all, the research was presented three weeks ago at the Chaos Communication Congress and promptly circulated around the world. The security flaws discovered by the researchers allow users to run Linux on their machines again — something Sony used to support but recently started trying to prevent. Paying lawyers to try to put the cat back in the bag is just throwing good money after bad. And even if they won — we'll save the legal analysis for another post — the defendants seem unlikely to be able to pay significant damages. So what's the point?

The real point, it appears, is to send a message to security researchers around the world: publish the details of our security flaws and we'll come after youwith both barrels blazing. For example, Sony has asked the court to immediately impound all "circumvention devices" — which it defines to include not only the defendants' computers, but also all "instructions," i.e., their research and findings. Given that the research results Sony presumably cares about are available online, granting the order would mean that everyone except the researchers themselves would have access to their work.

-https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/01/sony-v-hotz-sony-sends-dangerous-message

We’re gathered in a conference room on the Berkeley campus, the detritus of a LAN party scattered around us. The table is covered with computers and pizza, and there’s a game of StarCraft projected on the screen. Oriol Vinyals, a PhD student in computer science, is commanding the Terran army in a life-or-death battle against the forces of the Zerg Swarm.

Oriol is very good—one-time World Cyber Games competitor, number 1 in Spain, top 16 in Europe good. But his situation now is precarious: his goliath walkers are holding off the Zerg’s flying mutalisks, but they can’t be everywhere at once. The Zerg player is crafty, retreating in the face of superior firepower but never going far, picking off targets of opportunity and applying constant pressure.

Then Oriol makes a mistake. He moves his goliaths slightly out of position, just for a few seconds. It’s enough. The mutalisks react instantly, streaming through the gap in his defenses and making straight for his vulnerable workers. By the time Oriol brings the goliaths back to drive off the mutalisks, his workers are wiped out and his resource production is crippled.

Oriol makes a desperate, last-ditch attack on the Zerg base, trying to break through before the mutalisks are reinforced, but it’s too late. One after another, his goliaths get ripped apart by the Zerg defenses. As a new wave of mutalisks emerges from the Zerg hatcheries, he has no choice but to concede—to the computerized AI that just defeated him.

There's a palpable air of celebration in the room; even Oriol is grinning. He was just beaten by the Berkeley Overmind, an AI agent that our team in the room spent the past few months working on. The Overmind is our entry into the 2010 StarCraft AI Competition, and after dozens of test matches, it has finally defeated our human StarCraft expert for the first time

-http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swarm-how-the-berkeley-overmind-won-the-2010-starcraft-ai-competition.ars/

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