Category: Privacy & Security
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Ohio Study: Scariest E-Voting Security Report Yet
The State of Ohio released the report of a team of computer scientists it commissioned to study the state’s e-voting systems. Though it’s a stiff competition, this may qualify as the scariest e-voting study report yet. This was the most detailed study yet of the ES&S iVotronic system, and it confirmss the results of the…
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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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Verizon Violates Net Neutrality with DNS Deviations
While many of us were discussing Comcast’s partial blocking of BitTorrent Traffic, and debating its implications for the net neutrality debate, a more clear-cut neutrality violation was apparently taking place on Verizon’s network – a redirection of Verizon customers’ failed DNS lookups, to drive traffic to Verizon’s own search engine. Here’s the background. Suppose you’re…
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AT&T Explains Guilt by Association
According to government documents studied by The New York Times, the FBI asked several phone companies to analyze phone-call patterns of Americans using a technology called “communities of interest”. Verizon refused, saying that it didn’t have any such technology. AT&T, famously, did not refuse. What is the “communities of interest” technology? It’s spelled out very…
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Comcast and Net Neutrality
The revelation that Comcast is degrading BitTorrent traffic has spawned many blog posts on how the Comcast incident bolsters the blogger’s position on net neutrality – whatever that position happens to be. Here is my contribution to the genre. Mine is different from all the others because … um … well … because my position…
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Greetings, and a Thought on Net Neutrality
Hello again, FTT readers. You may remember me as a guest blogger here at FTT, writing about anti-circumvention, the print media’s superiority (or lack thereof) to Wikipedia, and a variety of other topics. I’m happy to report that I’ve moved to Princeton to join the university’s Center for Information Technology Policy as its new associate…
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Response to ITIF Voting Report
[This post was written by David Robinson and me, based on our discussions with Alex Halderman, Joe Calandrino, and Ari Feldman.] On Tuesday, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released a report on the possible role of paper trails in auditing elections conducted using DRE machines. The report contained a blend of reasonable and unreasonable…
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E-Voting Ballots Not Secret; Vendors Don't See Problem
Two Ohio researchers have discovered that some of the state’s e-voting machines put a timestamp on each ballot, which severely erodes the secrecy of ballots. The researchers, James Moyer and Jim Cropcho, used the state’s open records law to get access to ballot records, according to Declan McCullagh’s story at news.com. The pair say they…
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More California E-Voting Reports Released; More Bad News
Yesterday the California Secretary of State released the reports of three source code study teams that analyzed the source code of e-voting systems from Diebold, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia. Diebold systems Hart InterCivic systems Sequoia systems All three reports found many serious vulnerabilities. It seems likely that computer viruses could be constructed that could infect…
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Where are the California E-Voting Reports?
I wrote Monday about the California Secretary of State’s partial release of report from the state’s e-voting study. Four subteams submitted reports to the Secretary, but as yet only the “red team” and accessibility teams’ reports have been released. The other two sets of reports, from the source code review and documentation review teams, are…