Year: 2023
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CITP Comments on AI Accountability
Recently, the White House opened a number of opportunities for the public to comment on the growing field of accountability for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the Executive Branch agency that is principally responsible for advising the President on telecommunications and information policy issues, launched a comment process that…
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Security Analysis of the Dominion ImageCast X
Today, the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Georgia permitted the public release of Security Analysis of Georgia’s ImageCast X Ballot Marking Devices, a 96-page report that describes numerous security problems affecting Dominion voting equipment used in Georgia and other states.
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States Sending Data to TikTok from Government Websites Despite Concerns
By Yash Parikh and Mihir Kshirsagar While some states like Montana are trying to ban data collection by TikTok, other states like Missouri are actively – and perhaps, unknowingly – sending their citizen’s data to TikTok. Yash Parikh, a Princeton computer science student, conducted research that reveals that at least one Missouri government website – covidvaccine.mo.gov…
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Unsealing the Halderman report would be Responsible Vulnerability Disclosure
Statement by Computer Security Experts, May 12, 2023 The report on security flaws in Dominion voting machines, written by Professors J. Alex Halderman and Drew Springall in July 2021 and placed under seal by the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, should be immediately unsealed by the Court and be made public. …
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Willful disregard of voter intent in Los Angeles
Part 4 of a 4-part series When the voter marks 2 votes in a vote-for-1 contest, or 5 votes in a vote-for-4 contest (etc.), that’s called an overvote. The Los Angeles VSAP optical-scan voting machines are so eager to treat a mark as a vote, that they treat stray marks of the kind illustrated here…
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Expensive and ineffective recounts in Los Angeles County
Part 3 of a 4-part series In a recent article I wrote about the recount of a very close tax-rate referendum in the city of Long Beach, California. The referendum passed by 16 votes out of 100,000 ballots; the opponents of the measure requested a recount, as they are entitled to do by California law—provided…
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Best practices for sorting mail-in ballots
Part 2 of a 4-part series My previous article explained why it’s a bad practice, used in some election offices, to open absentee ballot envelopes before sorting them by precinct (or ballot-style). Those jurisdictions rely on the ballot-style barcode, printed on the optical-scan ballot, that tells the Central Count Optical Scan (CCOS) voting machine what’s…
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Sort the mail-in ballot envelopes, or don’t?
How mail-in ballot envelopes are handled by local election officials can make a huge difference in the cost of recounts and can also affect the security of elections against one form of voting fraud. Counties that count thousands or millions of mail-in (or dropbox) ballots can do it two ways: Sort-then-scan: Sort the ballot envelopes…
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Decoding China’s Ambitious Generative AI Regulations
By Sihao Huang and Justin Curl On April 11th, 2023, China’s top internet regulator proposed new rules for generative AI. The draft builds on previous regulations on deep synthesis technology, which contained detailed provisions on user identity registration, the creation of a database of undesirable inputs, and even the generation of “special objects and scenes”…
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Can ChatGPT—and its successors—go from cool to tool?
Anyone reading Freedom to Tinker has seen examples of ChatGPT doing cool things. One of my favorites is its amazing answer to this prompt: “write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.” Based in part on this kind of…