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Comment by moocowduckquack | Hacker News Reader

They should try and publish it with the cambridge lot who write the light blue touchpaper blog.

http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/

They ran into a similar situation with the banks and answered with one of the best academic slap downs I have ever read.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/ukca.pdf

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Cambridge CompSci here, Dr. Anderson, apart from his academic work, is known to be a very powerful and influential scholar in Cambridge. He also orchestrated a campaign against university so that the scholars can own their intellectual property rather than the university and was very successful in his campaign. So it is no surprise that his response to such a phony request is glorious.

I'm not sure that's accurate. There are a bunch of rules etc about 'IP' in general. I've no doubt Ross was involved in the process but 'orchestrating a campaign' seems a bit grandiose.

http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/research/research/ipr.asp...

See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/ccf.html

Thank you, I stand corrected. I was aware of the copyright issues (where the University tried to say it was theirs) but knew less about the general IP 'land grab' that University undertook. More background is at the link below.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/ccf-campaign.html

Fantastic response.

This is the preceding request:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/20101221110342233.pdf

Indeed. Thanks for posting the original request as well.

I'm an admirer of Ross Anderson but it seems, based on the reporting, the Garcia et al have got themselves into a slightly different situation - I don't think that the chip and PIN disclosures ever resulted in an actual injunction from an actual court, all the banks were doing there was essentially threatening the researchers involved and the academics as a whole. It's one thing to take on card issuers but you can't just write a letter like Dr Anderson's to the High Court and expect them to say, "well that's OK then". That's called contempt of court and it's a crime everywhere in the world.

Dr Anderson has reportedly been injuncted on other occasions[0] but those don't seem to relate to chip and PIN.

I think that the intrusion into academic freedom is lamentable but without any link to the case documents it's hard to say exactly on what basis the interim decision was made. In any event as it's only an interim injunction it may well be overturned at full trial.

My two cents is that the case for disclosure here, while instinctively convincing, is not as urgent as it has been with the vulnerabilities revealed in financial systems. In those cases, for example, banks were refusing to repay money stolen from individuals on the basis that the banks' systems were secure so it must have been the customers at fault. Dr Anderson and others were extremely convincing in showing that this was not necessarily the case. (I don't know if that has filtered through to the financial world at large - are people still being told there are no security holes?)

Perhaps it's just that I don't feel that bad about people having their Bentleys stolen but probably we can wait for trial here (assuming it's not just a strategy by the car manufacturers to bankrupt or intimidate the academics involved).

[0]: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/24/citibank_gags_crypto...

That is glorious.

This is wonderful. Thanks for sharing, and thanks to prof. Anderson for taking the stand he took.

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