Category: Uncategorized
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Pro-Competition Ruling in Lexmark Case
Yesterday the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Lexmark v. Static Control. The Court said, in effect, that Lexmark could not leverage copyright and DMCA claims to keep a competitor from making toner cartridges that work with Lexmark printers. This reversed a lower court decision. [Backstory: Lexmark-brand toner cartridges contain a short computer program…
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Another E-Voting Glitch: Miscalibrated Touchscreens
Voters casting early ballots in New Mexico report that the state’s touchscreen voting machines sometimes record a vote for the wrong candidate, according to a Jim Ludwick story in the Albuquerque Journal. (Link via DocBug) [Kim Griffith] went to Valle Del Norte Community Center in Albuquerque, planning to vote for John Kerry. “I pushed his…
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LAMP and Regulatory Arbitrage
Today, MIT’s LAMP system goes back on line, with a new design. LAMP (“Library Access to Music Project”) streams music to the MIT campus via the campus cable TV system. Any student can connect to LAMP’s website and choose a sequence of songs. The chosen songs are then scheduled for playing on one of sixteen…
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Tit for Tat
Recent news stories, picked up all over blogland, reported that Tit-for-Tat has been dethroned as the best strategy in iterated prisoners’ dilemma games. In a computer tournament, a team from Southampton University won with a new strategy, beating the Tit-for-Tat strategy for the first time. Here’s the background. Prisoners’ Dilemma is a game with two…
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Preemptive Blame-Shifting by the E-Voting Industry
The November 2nd election hasn’t even happened yet, and already the e-voting industry is making excuses for the election-day failures of their technology. That’s right – they’re rebutting future reports of future failures. Here’s a sample: Problem Voting machines will not turn on or operate. Explanation Voting machines are not connected to an active power…
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Privacy, Recording, and Deliberately Bad Crypto
One reason for the growing concern about privacy these days is the ever-decreasing cost of storing information. The cost of storing a fixed amount of data seems to be dropping at the Moore’s Law rate, that is, by a factor of two every 18 months, or equivalently a factor of about 100 every decade. When…
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DoJ To Divert Resources to P2P Enforcement
Last week the Department of Justice issued a report on intellectual property enforcement. Public discussion has been slow to develop, since the report seems to be encoded in some variant of the PDF format that stops many people from reading it. (I could read it fine on one of my computers, but ran into an…
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Fast-Forwarding Becomes a Partisan Issue
Remember when I suggested that Republicans might be more prone to copyright sanity than Democrats? Perhaps I was on to something. Consider a recent Senate exchange that was caught by Jason Schultz and Frank Field. Senator John McCain (Republican from Arizona) has placed a block on two copyright-expansion bills, H.R. 2391 and H.R. 4077, because…
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Another Broken Diebold Protocol
Yesterday I wrote about a terribly weak security protocol in the Diebold AccuVote-TS system (at least as it existed in 2002), as reported in a talk by Dan Wallach. That wasn’t the only broken Diebold protocol Dan discussed. Here’s another one which may be even scarier. The Diebold system allows a polling place administrator to…
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Bad Protocol
Dan Wallach from Rice University was here on Monday and gave a talk on e-voting. One of the examples in his talk was interesting enough that I thought I would share it with you, both as an introductory example of how security analysts think, and as an illustration of how badly Diebold botched the design…