Category: Other Topics
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Accountable Algorithms: An Example
I wrote yesterday about accountable algorithms. When I say that a public algorithm is “accountable” I mean that the output produced by a particular execution of the algorithm can be verified as correct after the fact by a skeptical member of the public. Today I want to work through an example.
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Accountable Algorithms
Ethan Zuckerman had an interesting reaction to his first experience with the TSA Pre-Check program, which lets frequent flyers go through a much shorter and less elaborate procedure at airport security checkpoints. Ethan’s concerns about unfairness are worth pondering, but I want to focus here on his call for more openness about the algorithm that…
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Opening Government: On the Limits of FOIA and the Metaphor of Transparency
At a recent symposium (“Piracy and the Politics of Policing: Legislating and Enforcing Copyright Law”) sponsored by the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, I was invited to respond to an excellent paper by David Levine on secrecy, national security, and the denial of public access to documents from the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiation…
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Broken Ballots
A important new book has just been published on the technology and policy of elections. Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count by Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, covers voting systems from the 19th century to the present, with particular focus on the last two decades. The authors describe the strengths and weaknesses of the…
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Who won the Iowa primary – and does it matter from a technical perspective?
As Americans know, the 2012 presidential season began “officially” with the Iowa caucuses on January 3. I say “officially”, because caucuses are a strange beast that are a creation of political parties, and not government. Regardless, the Republican results were interesting – out of about 125,000 votes cast, Mitt Romney led by eight votes over…
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"Stolen" LinkedIn Profiles and the Misappropriation of Ideas
The common law tort of “hot news” misappropriation has been dying a slow and justified death. Hot news misappropriation is the legal doctrine on which news outlets like the Associated Press have repeatedly relied over the years to try to prevent third-party dissemination of factual information gathered at the outlets’ expense. Last June, the Second…
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Applications and Appliances: A Conversation with Jonathan Zittrain
Professor Jonathan Zittrain is well-known for his concern that the general-purpose computer may be disappearing. The recent rise of app stores is putting his fears in a new light. After trading some thoughts about the issues in the blogosphere, he and I sat down at our respective keyboards for a conversation about the future of…
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ACM opens another hole in the paywall
Last month I wrote about Princeton University’s new open-access policy. In fact, Princeton’s policy just recognizes where many disciplines and many scholarly publishers were going already. Most of the important publication venues in Computer Science already have an open-access policy–that is, their standard author copyright contract permits an author to make copies of his or…
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Appeal filed in NJ voting-machines lawsuit
Paperless (DRE) voting machines went on trial in New Jersey in 2009, in the Gusciora v. Corzine lawsuit. In early 2010 Judge Linda Feinberg issued an Opinion that was flawed in many ways (factually and legally). But Judge Feinberg did at least recognize that DRE voting machines are vulnerable to software-based election fraud, and she…
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What happens when the printed ballot face doesn't match the electronic ballot definition?
Part 4 of 4. Complete 4-part series available here. The Sequoia AVC Advantage is an old-technology direct-recording electronic voting machine. It doesn’t have a video display; the candidate names are printed on a large sheet of paper, and voters indicate their choices by pressing buttons that are underneath the paper. A “ballot definition” file in…