Category: Uncategorized
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More E-Voting Follies
Lately it seems that we’ve seen one story after another about the carelessness of e-voting vendors, especially Diebold. Here are two. (1) Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation (who has been, in my experience, a reliable source of information) reported this: This afternoon [apparently Tuesday – EF] I attended a meeting of the California…
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Do We Want a Do-Not-Email List?
The CAN-SPAM Act, signed into law yesterday by President Bush, will take effect on January 1. The Act asks the Federal Trade Commission to study whether a national do-not-spam list, akin to the much-loved do-not-call list, should be implemented. It’s an interesting question. The crux of the problem is the danger that the do-not-spam list…
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Painters Buy White Canvases for a Reason
Wendy Seltzer (pointing to Ross Mayfield) quotes Verisign CEO Stratton Sclavos as saying, “We have to move the complexity back into the center of the network and remove it from the edge.” As even mid-level netheads know, this is the antithesis of the Internet’s design – the Internet approach is to put intelligence at the…
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Techno-Lockdown Not Likely
Steven Levy, in Newsweek, offers a dystopian vision for the future of the Internet: Picture, if you will, an information infrastructure that encourages censorship, surveillance and suppression of the creative impulse. Where anonymity is outlawed and every penny spent is accounted for. Where the powers that be can smother subversive (or economically competitive) ideas in…
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Abusable Technologies Awareness Center
That’s the name of a new group blog on cyber-security, at http://www.abusabletech.org, to which I’ll be contributing. There are nineteen contributors, including some of the most prominent researchers in the field. I’m excited to be associated with such an eminent group, and I have high hopes for ATAC. Freedom to Tinker will continue as always.…
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Devil in the Details
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about compulsory license schemes for music. I’ve said before that I’m skeptical about their practicality. One reason for my skepticism is a concern about the measurement problem, and especially about the technical details of how measurement would be done. To split up the revenue pool, compulsory license schemes…
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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.…