Category: Uncategorized
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Hurricane Ike status report: electrical power is cool
Today, we checked out the house, again, and lo and behold, it finally has power again! Huzzah! All in all, it hasn’t been that bad for us. We crashed with friends, ate out all the time, and (thankfully) had daycare for our daughter as of Thursday last week. Indeed, I’m seeing fewer people’s kids around…
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Hurricane Ike status report
Many people have been emailing me to send their best wishes. I thought it would be helpful to post a brief note on what happened and where we’re all at. As you know, Hurricane Ike hit shore early Saturday morning. The wind, combined with a massive storm surge, caused staggering devastation along the Texas coast.…
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Welcome to the new Freedom to Tinker
Welcome to the new, redesigned Freedom to Tinker. Beyond giving it a new look, we have rebuilt the site as a blogging community, to highlight the contributions of more authors. The front page and main RSS feed will offer a combination of posts from all authors. We have also added a blog page (and feed)…
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On digital TV and natural disasters
As I’m writing this, the eye of Hurricane Ike is roughly ten hours from landfall. The weather here, maybe 60 miles inland, is overcast with mild wind. Meanwhile, the storm surge has already knocked out power for ten thousand homes along the coast, claims the TV news, humming along in the background as I write…
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Preparing for a natural disaster
As Tinker readers may know, I live in Houston, Texas, and we’ve got Hurricane Ike bearing down on us. Twenty-four hours ago, I was busy with everything else and hadn’t even stopped to think about it. Earlier this week, the forecasts had Ike going far south of here. That all changed and now it appears…
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A curious phone scam
My phone at work rings. The caller ID has a weird number (“50622961841” – yes, it’s got an extra digit in it). I answer. It’s a recording telling me I can get lower rates on my card (what card?) if I just hit one to connect me to a representative. Umm, okay. “1”. Recorded voiced:…
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Come Join Us Next Spring
It’s been an exciting summer here at the Center for Information Technology Policy. On Friday, we’ll be moving into a brand new building. We’ll be roughly doubling our level of campus activity—lectures, symposia and other events—from last year. You’ll also see some changes to our online activities, including a new, expanded Freedom to Tinker that…
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Cheap CAPTCHA Solving Changes the Security Game
ZDNet’s “Zero Day” blog has an interesting post on the gray-market economy in solving CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are those online tests that ask you to type in a sequence of characters from a hard-to-read image. By doing this, you prove that you’re a real person and not an automated bot – the assumption being that bots…
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Gymnastics Scores and Grade Inflation
The gymnastics scoring in this year’s Olympics has generated some controversy, as usual. Some of the controversy feel manufactured: NBC tried to create a hubbub over Nastia Liukin losing the uneven bars gold medal on the Nth tiebreaker; but top-level sporting events whose rules do not admit ties must sometimes decide contests by tiny margins.…
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How do you compare security across voting systems?
It’s a curious problem: how do you compare two completely unrelated voting systems and say that one is more or less secure than the other? How can you meaningfully compare the security of paper ballots tabulated by optical scan systems with DRE systems (with or without VVPAT attachments)? There’s a clear disconnect on this issue. …