Author: Ed Felten
-
Manipulating Reputation Systems
BoingBoing points to a nice pair of articles by Annalee Newitz on how people manipulate online reputation systems like eBay’s user ratings, Digg, and so on. There’s a myth floating around that such systems distill an uncannily accurate folk judgment from the votes submitted by millions of ordinary citizens. The wisdom of crowds, and all…
-
Sarasota: Could a Bug Have Lost Votes?
At this point, we still don’t know what caused the high undervote rate in Sarasota’s Congressional election. [Background: 1, 2.] There are two theories. The State-commissioned study released last week argues that for the theory that a badly designed ballot caused many voters to not see that race and therefore not cast a vote. Today…
-
Sarasota Voting Machines Insecure
The technical team commissioned by the State of Florida to study the technology used in the ill-fated Sarasota election has released its report. (Background: on the Sarasota election problems; on the study.) One revelation from the study is that the iVotronic touch-screen voting machines are terribly insecure. The machines are apparently susceptible to viruses, and…
-
Why Understanding Programs is Hard
Senator Sam Brownback has reportedly introduced a bill that would require the people rating videogames to play the games in their entirety before giving a rating. This reflects a misconception common among policymakers: that it’s possible to inspect a program and figure out what it’s going to do. It’s true that some programs can be…
-
AACS: Slow Start on Traitor Tracing
[Previous posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.] Alex wrote on Thursday about the next step in the breakdown of AACS, the encryption scheme used on next-gen DVD discs (HD-DVD and Blu-ray): last week a person named Arnezami discovered and published a processing key that apparently can be used to…
-
How Much Bandwidth is Enough?
It is a matter of faith among infotech experts that (1) the supply of computing and communications will increase rapidly according to Moore’s Law, and (2) the demand for that capacity will grow roughly as fast. This mutual escalation of supply and demand causes the rapid change we see in the industry. It seems to…
-
SonyBMG (Accidentally?) Giving Away MP3 of New Billy Joel Song
Billy Joel’s new song, “All My Life” is being released in stages. Presently it’s available for free streaming from People Magazine’s site. Later in the month it will be available for purchase only at the iTunes Music store. After that it will be released in other online stores. Or at least that was the plan…
-
Apple Offers to Sell DRM-Free Music
The Net is buzzing with talk about the open letter posted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs yesterday. In an apparent reversal, Jobs offers to sell MP3 files, free of anti-copying DRM technology, on the iTunes Music Store if the major record companies allow it. Much as I would like to see Apple renounce DRM entirely,…
-
Sarasota: Limited Investigations
As I wrote last week, malfunctioning voting machines are one of the two plausible theories that could explain the mysterious undervotes in Sarasota’s congressional race. To get a better idea of whether malfunctions could be the culprit, we would have to investigate – to inspect the machines and their software for any relevant errors in…
-
Why So Many Undervotes in Sarasota?
The big e-voting story from November’s election was in Sarasota, Florida, where a congressional race was decided by about 400 votes, with 18,412 undervotes. That’s 18,412 voters who cast votes in other races but not, according to the official results, in that congressional race. Among voters who used the ES&S iVotronic machines – that is,…