Category: Uncategorized
-
The DC Metro and the Invisible Hand
My friend Tom Lee has been pestering the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the agency that runs the DC area’s public transit system, to publish its schedule data in an open format. That will allow companies like Google to include the information in products like Google Transit. It seems that Google has been negotiating with…
-
The Journal Misunderstands Content-Delivery Networks
There’s been a lot of buzz today about this Wall Street Journal article that reports on the shifting positions of some of the leading figures of the network neutrality movement. Specifically, it claims that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have abandoned their prior commitment to network neutrality. It also claims that Larry Lessig has “softened” his…
-
Election Transparency Project Finds Ballot-Counting Bug
Yesterday, Kim Zetter at Wired News reported an amazing e-voting story about lost ballots and the public advocates who found them. Here’s a summary: Humboldt County, California has an innovative program to put on the Internet scanned images of all the optical-scan ballots cast in the county. In the online archive, citizens found 197 ballots…
-
On the future of voting technologies: simplicity vs. sophistication
Yesterday, I testified before a hearing of Colorado’s Election Reform Commission. I made a small plug, at the end of my testimony, for a future generation of electronic voting machines that would use crypto machinery for end-to-end / software independent verification. Normally, the politicos tend to ignore this and focus on the immediately actionable stuff…
-
Discerning Voter Intent in the Minnesota Recount
Minnesota election officials are hand-counting millions of ballots, as they perform a full recount in the ultra-close Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. Minnesota Public Radio offers a fascinating gallery of ballots that generated disputes about voter intent. A good example is this one: A scanning machine would see the Coleman and Franken…
-
The future of photography
Several interesting things are happening in the wild world of digital photography as it’s colliding with digital video. Most notably, the new Canon 5D Mark II (roughly $2700) can record 1080p video and the new Nikon D90 (roughly $1000) can record 720p video. At the higher end, Red just announced some cameras that will ship…
-
Total Election Awareness
Ed recently made a number of predictions about election day (“Election 2008: What Might Go Wrong”). In terms of long lines and voting machine problems, his predictions were pretty spot on. On election day, I was one of a number of volunteers for the Election Protection Coalition at one of 25 call centers around the…
-
How Fragile Is the Internet?
With Barack Obama’s election, we’re likely to see a revival of the network neutrality debate. Thus far the popular debate over the issue has produced more heat than light. On one side have been people who scoff at the very idea of network neutrality, arguing either that network neutrality is a myth or that we’d…
-
Innovation vs. Safety in Self-driving Technologies
Over at Ars Technica, the final installment of my series on self-driving cars is up. In this installment I focus on the policy implications of self-driving technologies, asking about regulation, liability, and civil liberties. Regulators will face a difficult trade-off between safety and innovation. One of the most important reasons for the IT industry’s impressive…
-
Bandwidth Needs and Engineering Tradeoffs
Tom Lee wonders about a question that Ed has pondered in the past: how much bandwidth does one human being need? I’m suspicious of estimates of exploding per capita bandwidth consumption. Yes, our bandwidth needs will continue to increase. But the human nervous system has its own bandwidth limits, too. Maybe there’ll be one more…