AtStake, a Cambridge-based security company, fired its CTO, Dan Geer, for co-authoring a report that criticized Microsoft security. Dan Geer is a world-renowned security expert. He was a systems manager on MIT Project Athena, including the ground-breaking Kerberos authentication system. He is the newest president of USENIX. Let’s face it: criticizing Microsoft security is not […]
Twenty years ago, Richard Stallman started the GNU project to provide a liberated alternative to highly-constrained closed software. The idea was and remains simple: users should be in full control of their software, including running it, modifying it, and restributing their modifications. Throughout the years, Stallman has often been characterized as a freak, a man […]
In my previous post, I mentioned Salon’s article on the many faults of a widely-used touch-screen voting system. It seems that some people got their panties in a twist about the world knowing their electronic voting boxes are pathetic. Spread the word. Copyright protection is now being used to hide the way our democracy runs. […]
A while ago, I worked on secure, scalable internet voting. It was nice in theory, and we explored some very interesting concepts. In the end, we concluded that, while the technology is interesting, the social and practical constraints make wide-scale secure internet voting completely infeasible. Now it seems that even non-internet, electronic voting is a […]
Like many other large publications, Le Monde publishes editorials, which summarize issues poorly and inconsistently. Their take on file sharing initially seems balanced, but this balance is, in fact, based on false assumptions. In Le Monde’s world, the record companies are selling a product at too high a price, and this high price justifies “stealing.” […]
Two years ago, I woke up in my Manhattan apartment to the sound of confused news reporting on my usual morning rock radio station. My last phone call of the day came from my parents before the networks went down, but just after I had time to tell them I was alright. I watched the […]