Year: 2003

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Expert Declaration in Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Company, LLC, et al. v. the Gator Corporation

I had the honor of preparing two expert declarations in Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Company, LLC, et al. v. the Gator Corporation in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia. My clients were the plaintiffs in the case, including the Washington Post Newsweek Interactive Company, Gannett Satellite Information Network, Media West-GSI, the New York Times Company, the Boston Globe Newspaper Company, Dow Jones, Smartmoney, the Chicago Tribute Interactive, Condenet, American City Business Journals, Cleveland Live, and Knight Riddler Digital.

Soon after my declarations, the case settled, and Gator stopped covering my clients’ sites with its popup advertising and other ads.

My declarations and other case documents.

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Documentation of Gator Advertisements and Targeting

The Gator Corporation designs software to display advertisements on users’ computer screens, triggered in part by the specific web sites users visit. The author has developed an automated method of determining which specific advertisements Gator has associated with which web sites, data that may be helpful to web site operators, policy-makers, and others in assessing Gator’s practices. This article offers listings of more than eight thousand specific sites targeted by Gator as well as analysis of the advertisements shown. An interface is also available to let interested Internet users to test Gator’s advertisements on their own.

Documentation of Gator Advertisements and Targeting

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Benjamin Edelman v. N2H2, Inc.

I sought to research and document sites categorized and restricted by Internet blocking program N2H2. N2H2’s block site list is protected by technical measures including an encryption system, but I sought to write software that would nonetheless allow me to access, analyze, and report its contents. However, I feared that conducting this work might expose me to liability for violation of the N2H2 License, of the Copyright Act of 1976, and of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as well as for misappropriation of N2H2’s trade secrets. With representation by the ACLU, I therefore sought from federal court a declaratory judgement that I could conduct this research and publication without fear of liability.

Case details including litigation documents

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Empirical Analysis of Google SafeSearch

Google offers interested users a version of its search engine restricted by a service it calls SafeSearch, intended to omit references to sites with “pornography and explicit sexual content.” However, testing indicates that SafeSearch blocks at least tens of thousands of web pages without any sexually-explicit content, whether graphical or textual. Blocked results include sites operated by educational institutions, non-profits, news media, and national and local governments. Among searches on sensitive topics such as reproductive health, SafeSearch blocks results in a way that seems essentially random; it is difficult to construct a rational non-arbitrary basis for which pages are allowed and which are omitted. Full article.

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Web Sites Sharing IP Addresses: Prevalence and Significance

Web Sites Sharing IP Addresses: Prevalence and Significance. (September 2013)

More than 87% of active domain names are found to share their IP addresses (i.e. their web servers) with one or more additional domains, and more than two third of active domain names share their addresses with fifty or more additional domains. While this IP sharing is typically transparent to ordinary users, it causes complications for those who seek to filter the Internet, restrict users’ ability to access certain controversial content on the basis of the IP address used to host that content. With so many sites sharing IP addresses, IP-based filtering efforts are bound to produce “overblocking” — accidental and often unanticipated denial of access to web sites that abide by the stated filtering rules.