Category: Uncategorized
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New Congress, Same Old Issues
With control of the House and Senate about to switch parties, everybody is wondering how the new management will affect their pet policy issues. Cameron Wilson has a nice forecast for tech policy issues such as competitiveness, globalization, privacy, DRM, and e-voting. Most of these don’t break down as partisan issues – differences are larger…
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Microsoft to Pay Per-Processor License on Zune
Last week Universal Music Group (UMG), one of the major record companies, announced a deal with Microsoft, under which UMG would receive a royalty for every Zune music player Microsoft sells. (Zune is Microsoft’s new iPod competitor.) This may be a first. Apple doesn’t pay a per-iPod fee to record companies; instead it pays a…
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Post-Election Review
How did e-voting technologies hold up in Tuesday’s election? It’s too early to tell for sure, but it looks as if there weren’t any major disasters. We saw the usual list of crashing, misbehaving, and non-functional machines. Some of these are just routine glitches or procedural problems. If somebody forgets to deliver power cords to…
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Unattended Voting Machines Already Showing Up
I was going about my business this morning when I was surprised to see some unattended electronic voting machines that had already been delivered to a polling place in advance of Tuesday’s election. I wasn’t looking for voting machines in this location, not knowing that it served as a polling place, but the machines were…
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Cuyahoga County Possibly Exposed Election System to Computer Virus
The Election Science Institute just released a statement revealing that the memory cards that will be used to store votes on Election Day in Cuyahoga County, Ohio were stuck into ordinary laptop computers in September. The release points to an online video shot by Cleveland-area filmmaker Jeffrey Kirkby, shows a group of election workers sitting…
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Diebold's Motherboard Flaw: Implications
Yesterday I explained the design error that led Diebold in 2005 to recall and replace the motherboards in thousands of voting machines, most of which had been used in the November 2004 election. Today I’ll talk about how the motherboard flaws might have affected the accuracy of elections. Machines with flawed boards were normally identified…
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Diebold Quietly Recalled Voting Machine Motherboards
Diebold replaced the motherboard (i.e., the main electronic component) on about 4700 of Maryland’s AccuVote-TS voting machines in 2005, according to Cameron Barr’s story in Thursday’s Washington Post. The company and state officials kept the recall quiet – even some members of the state’s Board of Elections were unaware of it until contacted by the…
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Why So Little Attention to Botnets?
Our collective battle against botnets is going badly, according to Ryan Naraine’s recent article in eWeek. What’s that? You didn’t know we were battling botnets? You’re not alone. Though botnets are a major cause of Internet insecurity problems, few netizens know what they are or how they work. In this context, a “bot” is a…
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YouTube and Copyright
YouTube has been much in the news lately. Around the time it was bought by Google for $1.65 billion, YouTube signed copyright licensing deals with CBS television and two record companies (UMG and Sony BMG). Meanwhile, its smaller rivals Bolt and Grouper were sued by the record industry for infringement. The copyright deals are interesting.…
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iPods Shipped with Worm Infection
Apple revealed yesterday that some new iPods – about 1% of the new iPod Videos shipped in the last month or so – were infected with a computer worm that will spread to Windows PCs, according to Brian Krebs at the Washington Post. Apparently a PC used to test the iPods got infected, and the…