Year: 2011
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Do photo IDs help prevent vote fraud?
In many states, an ID is required to vote. The ostensible purpose is to prevent people from casting a ballot for someone else – dead or alive. Historically, it was also used to prevent poor and minority voters, who are less likely to have government IDs, from voting. No one would (publicly) admit to the…
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Web Browsers and Comodo Disclose A Successful Certificate Authority Attack, Perhaps From Iran
Today, the public learned of a previously undisclosed compromise of a trusted Certificate Authority — one of the entities that issues certificates attesting to the identity of “secure” web sites. Last week, Comodo quietly issued a command via its certificate revocation servers designed to tell browsers to no longer accept 9 certificates. This is fairly…
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Google Should Stand up for Fair Use in Books Fight
On Tuesday Judge Denny Chen rejected a proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case. My write-up for Ars Technica is here. The question everyone is asking is what comes next. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the parties will go back to the bargaining table and hammer out a third iteration of the…
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Seals on NJ voting machines, as of 2011
Part of a multipart series starting here. During the NJ voting-machines trial, plaintiffs’ expert witness Roger Johnston testified that the State’s attempt to secure its AVC Advantage voting machines was completely ineffective: the seals were ill-chosen, the all-important seal use protocol was entirely missing, and anyway the physical design of this voting machine makes it…
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Internet Voting in Union Elections?
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) recently asked for public comment on a fascinating issue: what kind of guidelines should they give unions that want to use “electronic voting” to elect their officers? (Curiously, they defined electronic voting broadly to include computerized (DRE) voting systems, vote-by-phone systems and internet voting systems.) As a technology policy…
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A Legacy at Risk: How the new Ministry of Culture in Brazil reversed its digital agenda
Former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has become a prominent figure in the political world. When he completed his second and last term last December, 87% of Brazilians approved his government, an unprecedented high rate. So it is not surprising that his successor Dilma Roussef, the first woman elected president in Brazil, took…
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Seals on NJ voting machines, March 2009
During the NJ voting-machines trial, both Roger Johnston and I showed different ways of removing all the seals from voting machines and putting them back without evidence of tampering. The significance of this is that one can then install fraudulent vote-stealing software in the computer. The State responded by switching seals yet again, right in…
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Do corporations have a "personal privacy" right?
Today, the Supreme Court released its unanimous opinion in Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T Inc., No. 09-1279 (U.S. Mar. 1, 2011) At issue was the question, “Does a corporation have a “personal privacy” right under the Freedom of Information Act?” In this decision, the United States Supreme Court said “no.” The decision was 8-0 with…
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What are the Constitutional Limits on Online Tracking Regulations?
As the conceptual contours of Do Not Track are being worked out, an interesting question to consider is whether such a regulation—if promulgated—would survive a First Amendment challenge. Could Do Not Track be an unconstitutional restriction on the commercial speech of online tracking entities? The answer would of course depend on what restrictions a potential…
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A public service rant: please fix your bibliography
Like many academics, I spend a lot of time reading and reviewing technical papers. I find myself continually surprised at the things that show up in the bibliography, so I thought it might be worth writing this down all in one place so that future conferences and whatnot might just hyperlink to this essay and…