Category: Uncategorized
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Targeted political spam
I’ve complained about spammers before, but this one is new. I recently received a spam that supports the case of Michael Skelly for Congress, saying negative things about incumbent John Culberson. What’s interesting: this is my home precinct. These people are actually competing for my vote. This leads to the question: how on earth did…
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Independent Voters Disenfranchised in Louisiana
Louisiana held a Congressional primary election on October 4th, 2008. In the 4th-Congressional-district Democratic Primary, there were four candidates; the two candidates with the most votes advanced to the runoff. The margin between the second (advancing) candidate and the third (nonadvancing) candidate was 1,484 votes. But, as I will explain, at least 2,167 voters, and…
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Kentucky vs. 141 Domain Names
Yes, that is a title of a real, current legal case and controversy. (And, no, the links in this post are not spam… mostly gambling news sites seem to be reporting on this.) The Governor of Kentucky, through his Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, has moved in court to have 141 gambling-related domain names transferred…
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Report on the Sequioa AVC Advantage
Today I am releasing an in-depth study of the Sequoia AVC Advantage direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machine, available at citp.princeton.edu/voting/advantage. I led a team of six computer scientists in a monthlong examination of the source code and hardware of these voting computers, which are used in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and other states. The Rutgers Law…
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Life after Driving
I’m working on a three-part series on self-driving automobile technology for Ars Technica. In part one I covered the state of existing self-driving technology and highlighted the dramatic progress that has been made in recent years. In part two, I assume that the remaining technical hurdles can be surmounted and examine what the world might…
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Cloud(s), Hype, and Freedom
Richard Stallman’s recent description of ‘the cloud’ as ‘hype’ and a ‘trap’ seems to have stirred up a lot of commentary, but not a lot of clear discussion of the problems Stallman raised. This isn’t surprising- the term ‘the cloud’ has always been vague. (It was hard to resist saying ‘cloudy.’ 😉 When people say…
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Why is printing so hard?
Recently I bought a mildly used laser printer and wanted to set it up on my home network. In a better world, this would be a trivial exercise — just connect the printer to the network and let the computers discover it. In the actual world, it was a forty-five minute project that only a…
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California Issues Emergency Election Audit Regulations
The Office of the California Secretary of State has issued a set of proposed emergency regulations for post-election manual tallying of paper election records. In this post, my first at FTT, I’ll try to explain and contextualize this development. Since her election to office, California Secretary of State (CA SoS) Debra Bowen has methodically studied…
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Counting Electronic Votes in Secret
Things are not looking good for open government when it comes to observing poll workers on Election Night. Our state election laws, written for the old lever machines, now apply to Sequoia electronic voting machines. Andrew Appel and I have been asking a straightforward question: Can ordinary members of the public watch the procedures used…
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Piracy Statistics and the Importance of Journalistic Skepticism
If you’ve paid attention to copyright debates in recent years, you’ve probably seen advocates for more restrictive copyright laws claim that “counterfeiting and piracy” cost the US economy as much as $250 billion. When pressed, those who make these kinds of claims are inevitably vague about exactly where these figures come from. For example, I…