e-Voting: Wired has an absolutely mind-numbing list of issues with the security of Diebold voting machine procedures, including passwords printed in manuals which the staff can take home, that same password being reused for multiple systems including the on-site machines at polling stations, tamper-resistance measures being omitted, poll supervisors hired without background checks, bicycle locks being used to secure voting machines, one shared key used to ‘secure’ the memory cards, etc.
‘The election process is mainly based on trust,’ Ginnold said. ‘We trust that poll workers are not going to be tampering with them.’
It’s simply insane to replace a known-good voting system (even if it’s just First-Past-the-Post instead of Proportional Representation, but that’s another issue) with a quick hack like this, IMO.
Please vote anyway, if you’re a CA citizen. And not for the fondling meathead, naturally.
DMCA: EFF: Unintended Consequences: Five Years under the DMCA. An incredible list of cases where the DMCA was used unfairly to restrict competition, research, or fair use, some of which I didn’t even know about. For example, I didn’t realise that the International Information Hiding Workshop Conference will no longer hold conferences on US soil after Professor Ed Felten was threatened over their SDMI paper.
Politics: Michael Moore on how to talk to your conservative brother-in-law. MM may play to the gallery now and again, but sometimes, he’s a genius:
Paying workers more money makes you money!
Dear brother-in-law, when you don’t pay people enough for them to take care of life’s essentials, it ends up costing you and everybody else a lot of money. When you pay your employees more money, what do you think they do with it? Invest it in stocks? Hoard it in offshore accounts? No! They spend it! And what do they spend it on? The stuff you make and sell! If you pay people squat, or lay them off, they can’t buy your stuff. They become a drain on the economy; some turn to crime, and when they turn to crime, it’s your Mercedes they want, not some junker Oldsmobile in their poor neighbour’s driveway.
Science: IgNobel prize winners 2003, including a prize for the nation of Liechtenstein for renting out the entire country for ‘corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings’.
Comments closed