Tag: Technology and Freedom

Santa Clara County, California, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, has decided that their new electronic voting machines must offer voter-checkable audit records. An AP story at the New York Times reports that the vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems, will add paper receipt printers to their machines to accomodate the county. This looks like a…

Researchers at Cambridge University published information on a flaw in banks’ procedures that rogue bank employees may have been using to learn the PINs from many customers’ ATM cards. It has always been easy to forge ATM cards, so knowing the PIN allows criminals to steal money easily from customers’ accounts. Now some banks are…

Dan Gillmor’s Sunday column points out that hard-disk data storage now costs less than one dollar per gigabyte. Thanks to Moore’s law, the cost of storage is asymptotically approaching zero. It’s interesting to stop and think about what happens as storage becomes essentially free. Traditionally, storing data has been expensive, so we spent time sorting…

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a disappointing article on Microsoft’s Palladium. Like many Palladium articles, this one seems to look for conflict and disagreement rather than an explanation of what is really at stake. We hear about fair use, which in my view is not the main problem posed by Palladium. And we hear…

Sunday’s Washington Post published an AP article by Joseph B. Verrengia, detailing plans by journal editors to “Excise Material That Could Be Used by Militants to Help Make Biological Weapons.” Many prominent journals will participate, including “Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. “…

Karl-Friedrich Lenz, in reply to my previous e-voting posting, sings the praises of old-fashioned paper ballots, citing a Glenn Reynolds column. I agree with Lenz and Reynolds about the virtues of simple paper ballots that ask the voter to draw an X in the box next to their candidate’s name. Paper ballots are easy for…

Many computer scientists (including me) have endorsed a statement opposing the use of electronic voting machines that don’t provide a voter-verifiable audit trail. What this means is that the voter should get some concrete indication, other than just a message on a computer screen, that his or her vote has been recorded correctly. There are…

A new anti-terrorism bill criminalizes some uses of encryption: Sec. 2801. Unlawful use of encryption (a) Any person who, during the commission of a felony under Federal law, knowingly and willfully encrypts any incriminating communication or information relating to that felony – (1) in the case of a first offense under this section, shall be…

The Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade group, has filed a lengthy antitrust complaint against Microsoft with European authorities. The complaint centers on allegedly anticompetitive aspects of Windows XP. Here is an AP story; here is CCIA’s summary of the complaint. According to CCIA, they are accusing Microsoft of: Bundling multiple Microsoft products with…

Brian McWilliams, who perpetrated the terrorist website hoax I wrote about yesterday, has now posted his response, including a quasi-apology. [Link credit: Politech]