Author: Dan Wallach
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Internet Voting
(or, how I learned to stop worrying and love having the whole world know exactly how I voted) Tomorrow is “Super Tuesday” in the United States. Roughly half of the delegates to the Democratic and Republican conventions will be decided tomorrow, and the votes will be cast either in a polling place or through the…
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New York Times Magazine on e-voting
This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has an article by Clive Thompson on electronic voting machines. Freedom to Tinker’s Ed Felten is briefly quoted, as are a small handful of other experts. The article is a reasonable summary of where we are today, with paperless electronic voting systems on a downswing and optical scan paper…
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Latest voting system analysis from California
This summer, the California Secretary of State commissioned a first-ever “Top to Bottom Review” of all the electronic voting systems used in the state. In August, the results of the first round of review were published, finding significant security vulnerabilities and a variety of other problems with the three vendors reviewed at the time. (See…
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Further adventures in personal credit
In our last installment, I described how one of the mortgage vendors who I was considering for the loan for my new home failed to trigger the credit alerting mechanism (Debix) to which I was signed up. Since then, I’ve learned several interesting facts. First, the way that Debix operates is that they insert a…
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The ease of applying for a home loan
I’m currently in the process of purchasing a new house. I called up a well-known national bank and said I wanted a mortgage. In the space of 30 minutes, I was pre-approved, had my rates locked in, and so forth. Pretty much the only identifying information I had to provide was the employer, salary, and…
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attack of the context-sensitive blog spam?
I love spammers, really I do. Some of you may recall my earlier post here about freezing your credit report. In the past week, I’ve deleted two comments that were clearly spam and that made it through Freedom to Tinker’s Akismet filter. Both had generic, modestly complementary language and a link to some kind of…
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On freezing your credit reports
In my last post, where I discussed the (likely) theft of my SSN from the State of Ohio, I briefly discussed the possibility of “freezing” my credit report. I’ve done some more investigation on how, exactly, this works. Details seem to vary from state to state (Consumer’s Union has a nice summary), but you generally…
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On stolen data with privacy-relevant information
I just received a first-class letter from the State of Ohio, telling me: The State of Ohio has confirmed that your name and social security number was contained on a computer back-up device that was stolen. It is unlikely that someone can access the data contained in the device without specialized knowledge and equipment. Because…
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New business models in the recording industry
The New York Times Sunday Magazine has a fascinating piece that interviews and discusses Columbia Records’ hiring of Rick Rubin as their new studio chieftain. Rubin has been a well-known music producer (among other things, he orchestrated the famous mash-up of Aerosmith and Run-DMC and worked with Johnny Cash later in his life), and is…
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On the emotions you feel when you do a security review
[I’m happy to introduce Dan Wallach, who will be blogging here from time to time. Dan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. He’s a leading security expert who has done great work on several topics, including e-voting. – Ed] I was one of the co-authors of the Hart InterCivic source code…