The glorious Ed Felten, Princeton professor and RIAA taunter extraordinaire--"Your DRM smells of elderberries, ha!"--has been appointed the Federal Trade Commission's first Chief Technologist. He will advise the agency on emerging tech issues and policy. Felten currently directs Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, and has educated decades' worth of students about how to examine off-limit topics in security for the benefit of us all, such as electronic voting booths and DMCA-protected encryption systems. Felten champions the Happy Mutant notion that devices you own are yours to explore. At the FTC, I hope he will reveal colleagues' poorly-chosen passwords on a projector as guests enter the building. Read the rest