Author: Dan Wallach
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The future of high school yearbooks
The Dallas Morning News recently ran a piece about how kids these days aren’t interested in buying physical, printed yearbooks. (Hat tip to my high school’s journalism teacher, who linked to it from our journalism alumni Facebook group.) Why spend $60 on a dead-trees yearbook when you can get everything you need on Facebook? My…
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Usable security irony
I visited Usable Security (the web page for the 2007 Usability Security workshop) today to look up a reference, except the link I followed was actually the SSL version of the page. Guess what? Secure Connection Failed usablesecurity.org uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate expired on 12/29/08 12:21 AM. (Error code: sec_error_expired_certificate) This could…
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Acceptance rates at security conferences
How competitive are security research conferences? Several people have been tracking this information. Mihai Christodorescu has a nice chart of acceptance and submission rates over time. The most recent data point we have is the 2009 Usenix Security Symposium, which accepted 26 of 176 submissions (a 14.8% acceptance ratio, consistent with recent years). Acceptance rates…
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On open source vs. disclosed source voting systems
Sometimes, working on voting seems like running on a treadmill. Old disagreements need to be argued again and again. As long as I’ve been speaking in public about voting, I’ve discussed the need for voting systems’ source code to be published, as in a book, to create transparency into how the systems operate. Or, put…
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Thoughts on juries for intellectual property lawsuits
Here’s a thought that’s been stuck in my head for the past few days. It would never be practical, but it’s an interesting idea to ponder. David Robinson tells me I’m not the first one to have this idea, either, but anyway… Consider what happens in intellectual property lawsuits, particularly concerning infringement of patents or…
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The Future of Smartphone Platforms
In 1985, I got my very first home computer: a Commodore Amiga 1000. At the time, it was awesome: great graphics, great sound, “real” multitasking, and so forth. Never mind that you spent half your life shuffling floppy disks around. Never mind that I kept my head full of Epson escape codes to use with…
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Hulu abandons Boxee—now what?
In our last installment, I detailed the trials and tribulations of my attempt to integrate legal, Internet-sourced video into my home theater via a hacked AppleTV, running Boxee, getting its feed from Hulu. One day later (!), Hulu announced it was all over. Later this week, Hulu’s content will no longer be available through Boxee.…
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TiVo, AppleTV, Boxee, and the future of HD television delivery
I don’t watch as much TV as I once did. Yet, I’m still paying Comcast every month, as they’re the only provider who will sell me HD service compatible with my TiVo-HD. Sadly, Comcast is far from ideal. I’m regularly frustrated at their inability to debug their signal quality problems. (My ABC-HD and PBS-HD signals…
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Rethinking the voting system certification process
Lawsuits! Everybody’s filing lawsuits. Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold) is suing SysTest, one of the EAC’s testing authorities (or, more properly, former testing authorities, now that the EAC is planning to suspend their accreditation). There’s also a lawsuit between the State of Ohio and Premier over whether or not Premier’s voting systems satisfy Ohio’s requirements.…
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Internet voting-a-go-go
Yes, we know that there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system, but the Estonians are doing their best to get as far away from perfection as possible. According to the latest news reports, Estonia is working up a system to vote from mobile phones. This follows on their earlier web-based Internet voting. What…