Author: Dan Wallach
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On the future of voting technologies: simplicity vs. sophistication
Yesterday, I testified before a hearing of Colorado’s Election Reform Commission. I made a small plug, at the end of my testimony, for a future generation of electronic voting machines that would use crypto machinery for end-to-end / software independent verification. Normally, the politicos tend to ignore this and focus on the immediately actionable stuff…
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The future of photography
Several interesting things are happening in the wild world of digital photography as it’s colliding with digital video. Most notably, the new Canon 5D Mark II (roughly $2700) can record 1080p video and the new Nikon D90 (roughly $1000) can record 720p video. At the higher end, Red just announced some cameras that will ship…
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Vote flipping on the Hart InterCivic eSlate
There have been numerous press reports about “vote flipping.” I did an analysis of the eSlate, my local voting machine, including mocked up screen shots, to attempt to explain the issue.
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Targeted political spam
I’ve complained about spammers before, but this one is new. I recently received a spam that supports the case of Michael Skelly for Congress, saying negative things about incumbent John Culberson. What’s interesting: this is my home precinct. These people are actually competing for my vote. This leads to the question: how on earth did…
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Hurricane Ike status report: electrical power is cool
Today, we checked out the house, again, and lo and behold, it finally has power again! Huzzah! All in all, it hasn’t been that bad for us. We crashed with friends, ate out all the time, and (thankfully) had daycare for our daughter as of Thursday last week. Indeed, I’m seeing fewer people’s kids around…
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Hurricane Ike status report
Many people have been emailing me to send their best wishes. I thought it would be helpful to post a brief note on what happened and where we’re all at. As you know, Hurricane Ike hit shore early Saturday morning. The wind, combined with a massive storm surge, caused staggering devastation along the Texas coast.…
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On digital TV and natural disasters
As I’m writing this, the eye of Hurricane Ike is roughly ten hours from landfall. The weather here, maybe 60 miles inland, is overcast with mild wind. Meanwhile, the storm surge has already knocked out power for ten thousand homes along the coast, claims the TV news, humming along in the background as I write…
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Preparing for a natural disaster
As Tinker readers may know, I live in Houston, Texas, and we’ve got Hurricane Ike bearing down on us. Twenty-four hours ago, I was busy with everything else and hadn’t even stopped to think about it. Earlier this week, the forecasts had Ike going far south of here. That all changed and now it appears…
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A curious phone scam
My phone at work rings. The caller ID has a weird number (“50622961841” – yes, it’s got an extra digit in it). I answer. It’s a recording telling me I can get lower rates on my card (what card?) if I just hit one to connect me to a representative. Umm, okay. “1”. Recorded voiced:…
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How do you compare security across voting systems?
It’s a curious problem: how do you compare two completely unrelated voting systems and say that one is more or less secure than the other? How can you meaningfully compare the security of paper ballots tabulated by optical scan systems with DRE systems (with or without VVPAT attachments)? There’s a clear disconnect on this issue. …