'Do intellectual property (IP) rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent
innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by
the public Human Genome Project and the private rm Celera, this paper estimates
the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent scientic research and product
development. Genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two
years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public eort.
Across a range of empirical specications, I nd evidence that Celera's IP led to
reductions in subsequent scientic research and product development on the order of
20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera's short-term IP
had persistent negative eects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual
of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.' (via Tony Finch)

Gunnar Kreitz' paper on its innards! 'Spotify is a music streaming service offering lowlatency access to a library of over 8 million music tracks.
Streaming is performed by a combination of client-server access
and a peer-to-peer protocol. In this paper, we give an overview
of the protocol and peer-to-peer architecture used and provide
measurements of service performance and user behavior.
The service currently has a user base of over 7 million and
has been available in six European countries since October 2008.
Data collected indicates that the combination of the client-server
and peer-to-peer paradigms can be applied to music streaming
with good results. In particular, 8.8% of music data played comes
from Spotify’s servers while the median playback latency is only
265 ms (including cached tracks). We also discuss the user access
patterns observed and how the peer-to-peer network affects the
access patterns as they reach the server.'

from last week's CEAS conference; research comparing SpamAssassin releases against the evolution of the surrounding spam environment. Nice work, I always wanted to write up something like this (via JD)

'we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (E. coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution. ... both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions. This top-heavy organization leads to highly overlapping functional modules in the call graph, in contrast to the relatively independent modules in the regulatory network. ... These findings stem from the design principles of the two systems: robustness for biological systems and cost effectiveness (reuse) for software systems.' (via adulau)

'this is yet another case where security economics trumps security engineering, but in a predatory way that leaves cardholders less secure.'

reverse-engineering the output of spam templates. paper isn't published yet, but sounds very interesting, particularly since it overlaps with the SpamAssassin SOUGHT ruleset's methodology, a little, it sounds like. looking forward to reading it