Category: Uncategorized
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Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine
Today, Ari Feldman, Alex Halderman, and I released a paper on the security of e-voting technology. The paper is accompanied by a ten-minute video that demonstrates some of the vulnerabilities and attacks we discuss. Here is the paper’s abstract: Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward…
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9/11
Five years ago this morning I was in a hotel room in Minneapolis, getting dressed. I flipped on the TV and saw smoke streaming from a skyscraper. Nobody knew yet what it meant. My plan had been to meet a colleague in the lobby and walk over to our meeting. Everybody in the lobby area…
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E-Voting, Up Close
Recently the Election Science Institute released a fascinating report on real experience with e-voting technologies in a May 2006 primary election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (which includes Cleveland). The report digs beneath the too-frequent platitudes of the e-voting debates, to see how , poll workers and officials actually use the technology, what really goes wrong…
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Lost Comments
Yesterday somebody defaced this site. This trashed the database that backs the site, so we had to restore it from a backup. Everything seems to be back to normal, except that any comments submitted after the backup (about two days ago) were lost. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Silver Bullet Podcast
Today we’re getting hep with the youngsters, and offering a podcast in place of the regular blog entry. Technically speaking, it’s somebody else’s podcast – Gary McGraw’s Silver Bullet – but it is a twenty-minute interview with me, much of it discussing blog-related issues. Excerpts will appear in an upcoming issue of IEEE Security &…
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Don't Be Evil, Yet
Mike at TechDirt writes: As everyone is talking about Google’s (not particularly surprising or interesting) move into offering hosted business apps (basically taking their existing mail and calendar apps, and allowing you to run them for your business), it seems that the story of AOL’s new download software being criticized for secretly installing plenty of…
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Next-Gen DVD Support Yanked from 32-Bit Vista
Microsoft has announced that the 32-bit version of its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system product won’t support playing commercially-produced next-generation DVDs (i.e., HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs), according to Dan Warne’s story at APC. 32-bit Vista will be able to access the discs, reading and writing ordinary content, but they won’t be allowed to access DRM-encoded…
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Great, Now They'll Never Give Us Data
Today’s New York Times has an interesting article by Katie Hafner on AOL’s now-infamous release of customers’ search data. AOL’s goal in releasing the data was to help researchers by giving them realistic data to study. Today’s technologies, such as search engines, have generated huge volumes of information about what people want online and why.…
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Attacks on a Plane
Last week’s arrest of a gang of would-be airplane bombers unleashed a torrent of commentary, including much of the I told you so variety. One question that I haven’t heard discussed is why the group wanted to attack planes. The standard security narrative has attackers striking a system’s weak points, and defenders trying to identify…
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PRM Wars
Today I want to wrap up the recap of my invited talk at Usenix Security. Previously (1; 2) I explained how advocates of DRM-bolstering laws are starting to switch to arguments based on price discrimination and platform lock-in, and how technology is starting to enable the use of DRM-like technologies, which I dubbed Property Rights…