The Tech Law Prof Blog and Ars Technica have been reporting on the MIT students who were enjoined from sharing their research into the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's faulty "Charlie Card" system with hackers at Defcon. Specifically, the students were able to hack their Charlie Cards into reporting incorrect amounts of money. US District Judge Douglas Wood granted a preliminary ten-day gag order on the students on August 9th. As a result, the students were unable to present their paper as they had planned at Defcon, which took place between August 8-10. Meanwhile, MIT's student-run newspaper, The Tech, decided to publish the students' presentation (the document itself is actually a really interesting read if you can get it to load). At the hearing on Tuesday, Judge George O'Toole refused the MBTA's motion to extend the injunction by five months. Judge O'Toole did not consider the First Amendment argument presented by the Eletronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of the students. Instead, after reviewing evidence that the students did not actually abuse the system, but had simply discovered a theoretical exploit, the Judge found that the students had not violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That brings me to the one point that this ...

As a research assistant, I find myself reading an insane amount of law review articles. Adding Law Review to the mix means that I'll be reading a super insane number of law review articles next year. I always read these articles and notice that they've been written in a nice outline format, but Lexis doesn't give you any kind of table of contents to quickly analyze the argument structure. Reading all of the headings can usually give you some idea of whether the article is going to be of any use, so why not have these headings given up front? LexisNexis, I'm looking at you. Anyway, I got tired of waiting for this feature, so I decided to write some python code to do it. OS X / Linux people, you're stuck downloading python and running python code linked above. If you need any assistance, feel free to ask. Windows people, you need to download and install python, and then download and install my program. After you install python, the outliner will run from your Start Menu or Desktop like any other program you've ever downloaded. It's real simple to use. Cut and paste everything from the Text Section of the law review article, and ...

So I updated my iPhone from firmware 1.1.3 to 1.1.4 last night and found that Mail was constantly crashing, and Mail and my bookmarks wouldn't sync to my iTunes. After some messing around, it became apparent that this is just a permissions problem arising from the upgrade. Here's how to fix it (assuming you're Jailbroken):  ssh root@192.168.1.X (or your IP address -- note: default password is "alpine") cd /var/mobile/Library (note: I *think* that this may be /var/root/Library on iPhones prior to 1.1.3) chmod 0777 ./* Simple as that. Enjoy your new firmware.

My contracts exam is a few short hours away. You think that I'd be vigorously combing my notes and outlines, and absorbing esoteric contracts knowledge in hopes of gaining a few extra points, right? Wrong. I've been spending the morning trying to learn Python. As a result, please enjoy the world's least efficient prime number generator. You'd think that with a degree in physics, I could come up with a more elegant manner of doing this than bashing rocks against it... but you'd be wrong, eh? It does the primes up to 10,000 in about 8 seconds on my Macbook Pro; not terrible, right? Right?? Oh well, I suppose I better get back to contracts, which I'm arguably better at than Python.