Month: October 2006
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Diebold's Motherboard Flaw: Implications
Yesterday I explained the design error that led Diebold in 2005 to recall and replace the motherboards in thousands of voting machines, most of which had been used in the November 2004 election. Today I’ll talk about how the motherboard flaws might have affected the accuracy of elections. Machines with flawed boards were normally identified…
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Diebold Quietly Recalled Voting Machine Motherboards
Diebold replaced the motherboard (i.e., the main electronic component) on about 4700 of Maryland’s AccuVote-TS voting machines in 2005, according to Cameron Barr’s story in Thursday’s Washington Post. The company and state officials kept the recall quiet – even some members of the state’s Board of Elections were unaware of it until contacted by the…
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Why So Little Attention to Botnets?
Our collective battle against botnets is going badly, according to Ryan Naraine’s recent article in eWeek. What’s that? You didn’t know we were battling botnets? You’re not alone. Though botnets are a major cause of Internet insecurity problems, few netizens know what they are or how they work. In this context, a “bot” is a…
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YouTube and Copyright
YouTube has been much in the news lately. Around the time it was bought by Google for $1.65 billion, YouTube signed copyright licensing deals with CBS television and two record companies (UMG and Sony BMG). Meanwhile, its smaller rivals Bolt and Grouper were sued by the record industry for infringement. The copyright deals are interesting.…
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iPods Shipped with Worm Infection
Apple revealed yesterday that some new iPods – about 1% of the new iPod Videos shipped in the last month or so – were infected with a computer worm that will spread to Windows PCs, according to Brian Krebs at the Washington Post. Apparently a PC used to test the iPods got infected, and the…
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ThreeBallot and Tampering
Let’s continue our discussion (1; 2) of Rivest’s ThreeBallot voting system. I’ve criticized ThreeBallot’s apparent inability to handle write-in votes. More detailed critiques have come from Charlie Strauss (1; 2) and Andrew Appel. Their analysis (especially Charlie’s) is too extensive to repeat here, so I’ll focus on just one of Charlie’s ideas. Recall that ThreeBallot…
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Spamhaus Tests U.S. Control Over Internet
In a move sure to rekindle debate over national control of the Internet, a US court may soon issue an order stripping London-based spamhaus.org of its Internet name. Here’s the backstory. Spamhaus, an anti-spam organization headquartered in London, publishes ROKSO, the “Register of Known Spam Operations”. Many sites block email from ROKSO-listed sites, as an…
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ThreeBallot and Write-Ins
Yesterday I wrote about Ron Rivest’s ThreeBallot voting system. Today I want to start a discussion of problems with the system. (To reiterate: the purpose of this kind of criticism is not to dump on the designer but to advance our collective understanding of voting system design.) Charlie Strauss and Andrew Appel have more thorough…
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ThreeBallot
ThreeBallot is a new voting method from Ron Rivest that is supposed to make elections more secure without compromising voter privacy. It got favorable reviews at first – Michael Shamos even endorsed it at a congressional hearing – but further analysis shows that it has some serious problems. The story of ThreeBallot and its difficulties…
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Dutch E-Voting System Has Problems Similar to Diebold's
A team of Dutch researchers, led by Rop Gonggrijp and Willem-Jan Hengeveld, managed to acquire and analyze a Nedap/Groenendaal e-voting machine used widely in the Netherlands and Germany. They report problems strikingly similar to the ones Ari Feldman, Alex Halderman and I found in the Diebold AccuVote-TS. The N/G machines all seem to be opened…