A couple of years ago, IBM had fantastic TV ads about online business and the power of the network: a large Japanese company looking for a supplier finds a one-person small business in the US, all the while thinking they’re dealing with a huge corporation because their interface is the Internet. It was cute, it […]
Aaron has an optimistic piece about political marketing. He thinks most people are liberals, and if only liberals changed their political image, they’d win elections. I wish I could agree. I wish a simple Madison Avenue rebranding campaign could make Democrats more palatable. We’re entering an era of increased conservatism by some and dangerous radicalism […]
Though the overall result of the California Recall is undisputed, some questions are surfacing concerning the use of Diebold touch-screen voting machines due to some incredibly fishy results. Apparently, Diebold refuses to allow auditing of their voting machines or the setup of an alternative paper trail of votes to allow for recounts. This means that […]
Wendy Seltzer points out that Verisign will provide absentee voting technology. Who’s going to audit this technology? Will it be open-source so that anyone can audit it? In a previous post, I mentioned that current expert thinking on Internet Voting is mostly apocalyptic: we just don’t have the technology or social awareness to operate internet […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I’m back from a summer traveling in Europe and South America. Having spent more than half of my life living outside the US, I have some amount of perspective on what people think of this country and how those feelings have evolved over time. And I must say, it’s not a pretty picture. I vividly […]
I tend to pick my flights – especially the long ones – according to the plane model. Boeing 777s and Airbus A300s tend to be newer purchases with the latest and greatest in per-seat entertainment technology. So, given that my Paris/New-York flight this weekend was a Boeing 747 for large summer travel capacity, I was […]