Author: Ed Felten
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Voting Machine Vendors To Do … What?
In today’s Washington Post, Jonathan Krim reports on a new effort by the e-voting machine vendors to do … something or other. The article, which is titled “Voting-Machine Makers to Fight Security Criticism”, doesn’t quite say what they’re planning to do. The following two paragraphs come the closest to revealing their plans: Electronic-voting-machine companies announced…
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Reflections on the Harvard Alternative Compensation Meeting
Yesterday I attended a daylong workshop at Harvard Law School about alternative compensation systems for digital media. It was a great meeting, with many interesting people saying interesting things. There was a high density of other bloggers, including Ernie Miller, John Palfrey, Derek Slater, Aaron Swartz, and Eugene Volokh, and I hope to read their…
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Ohio E-Voting Analysis Finds Problems
The Ohio Secretary of State has announced the results of a study his office commissioned, which examined four e-voting systems. If you have been following this issue, you won’t be surprised to hear that the study found many flaws in the systems. Each system had at least one “high risk” problem. In addition, a study…
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More RIAA Suits — Are They Working?
The RIAA has filed yet another round of lawsuits against individuals they accuse of illegally redistributing music on the Net. There is some evidence that the suits filed so far may be working – that they may be successfully deterring some people from redistributing music online. And if the suits are working, that’s good news.…
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Diebold to Stop Suppressing Memos
Diebold has filed a court document promising not to sue people for posting the now-famous memos, and withdrawing the DMCA takedown notices it had sent previously. It’s a standard-issue lawyer’s non-surrender surrender (“Mr. Bonaparte, having demonstrated his mastery of the Waterloo battlefield, chooses to withdraw at this time”), asserting that “[u]nder well-established copyright law” Diebold…
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Taming EULAs
Most software programs, and some websites, are subject to End User License Agreements (EULAs). EULAs are long and detailed and apparently written by lawyer-bots. Almost everybody agrees to them without even reading them. A EULA is a contract, but it’s not the result of a negotiation between the vendor and the user. The vendor writes…
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California to Require Open-Source in Voting Software?
Donna Wentworth at Copyfight points to the fine print in the recent e-voting edict from California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, which says this: Any electronic verification method must have open source code in order to be certified for use in a voting system in California. Many computer scientists have argued that e-voting systems should…
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California to Require E-Voting Paper Trail
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley will announce today that as of 2006, all e-voting machines in the state must provide a voter-verifiable paper trail, according to an L.A. Times story by Allison Hoffman and Tim Reiterman. This is yet another sign that the push for sensible e-voting safeguards is gaining momentum. [Link credit: Siva…
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Princeton Ignores Strauss, Makes Sensible Decisions
The Office of Information Technology (OIT) here at Princeton has taken the unusual step of issuing a statement distancing itself from the views expressed by one of its employees, Howard Strauss, in a column in Syllabus magazine. (OIT operates the campus network and other shared computing facilities. It is not to be confused with the…
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CDT Report on Spyware
The Center for Democracy and Technology has issued a sensible and accessible paper about the spyware problem and associated policy issues. Spyware is software, installed on your computer without your consent, that gathers information about what you do on your computer. It’s shockingly common – if you are a typical active web surfer using Internet…