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Diebold officials, ... maintained its machines are safe, secure and demonstrated 100 percent accuracy in the March election.

Firstly, bullshit. Nothing's 100% accurate. Secondly, I don't care about one single election that happened to work. I want a process that is proven and well tested, independently, in stressed situations. Because March-in-Cali may've worked, but Jan-in-Maryland was a complete disaster ("I was really surprised with the totality of the problems we found. Just about everywhere we looked we found them,"

"We could have done anything we wanted to," Arbaugh said. "We could change the ballots (before the election) or change the votes during the election."

They also were able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack, which involves intercepting votes being sent by modem to the server, changing the votes and sending on the new votes to the server.

(More on the Maryland disaster at Wired. Amusingly enough, Diebold claimed that this validated their machines as capable to handle further elections.

Worse than just having an apparent interest in the outcome of the elections, Diebold managed to trip over the safety valves that are supposed to make sure no company can tamper with the results for any reason.

The software they ran, everywhere in the state, on election day was not the version that they submitted for certification. You just can't skip these kinds of checks and expect to be treated like your software is honest, because these reviews exist because we're just not going to take anybody's word for it.

At best, they cut a corner they weren't allowed to. But worse yet, they undermine their credibility in claiming that we can trust that they're not going to attempt to fix what is likely to be an extremely close election in November.

Nothing Diebold ran during the primary elections turned out to have its certifications in order. They got caught running an uncertified version of their software on the day it most counted.

The list of violations is just plain piling up, and in an industry where one use of uncertified software is too many to be tolerated.

http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63191,00.ht ml

Myself and my family are from Napa, CA (one of the cities that had some serious problems with Diebold), and I can't explain how frustrating it is to not be sure if your vote was counted properly or not. For democracy to work, you must have faith in the security and validity of the elections. Diebold has seriously undermined this, especially in my hometown. The jokes and grumblings have been raging, not to mention the rumors of the end of our Registrar of Voters' career. Although "no harm, no foul" has been claimed, confidence has been undermined, which IMHO, is one of the most important aspects of a good democracy.

The user bought Windows+IE, and knew they were getting it. They consented. And people have known MSIE is unsuitable for internet use since the mid 1990s.

If they knowingly buy crapware that automatically installs other crapware, then the second wave of crapware isn't the real problem, is it?

But how are you going to get anyone to want to install it? Users will Just Say No. How are you going to get distribution maintainers to include it? They're going to Just Say No also.

Sincerely,
Jim Bell

--

About a particularly nasty form of spyware.

Perhaps while the ACLU is in court that could pick up a copy of the Bill of Rights, not their edited 9 adm one, one that has all the adms in it.

Gun Groups Take Aim at Database
04:45 PM Dec. 01, 1998 PT

.....

The [National Rifle Association] claims that federal law requires the agency to destroy all records immediately after checking a prospective gun buyer's name against its list of people not permitted to purchase weapons.

If the NRA wins in court, the Justice Department will no longer keep personal records, but the FBI's computer will continue to process names before permitting gun purchases -- a system that has other gun-rights groups crying foul.

.....

The Justice Department first proposed storing information on gun purchases for 18 months for audit purposes but recently shortened that to six months following a public outcry.

"The department determined that the general retention period for records of allowed transfers in the NICS Audit Log" should be six months, the agency said in a 30 October statement. It also said that "such information may be retained for a longer period if necessary."

Keeping personal information on file is absolutely necessary, said Nancy Hwa, spokeswoman for the advocacy group Handgun Control.

"We've always favored having a system of licensing and registration in the first place. We should treat guns like cars. If people want to buy [a gun] they should be trained in its use."

Privacy advocates should wake up to the threat of databases of gun owners, said Lisa Dean, vice president of the conservative Free Congress Foundation.

"Privacy groups should take a stand. It's critical that privacy groups look beyond the gun-control issue and start looking at exactly what this is going to mean to them in the future," Dean said. "This is numbering and tracking citizens."

Liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have not opposed the FBI's plan to record personal information about gun buyers. EPIC director Marc Rotenberg likened the plan to driver licensing, adding that privacy safeguards should be in place.

our view has never been that civil liberties are necessarily coextensive with constitutional rights. Conversely, I guess the fact that something is mentioned in the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean that it is a fundamental civil liberty.

You probably read this article from Wired.

A recent Wired story hints that Google will be using some of their IPO proceeds to acquire some of the best API developments. Interesting... are the Google Web APIs nothing but another channel in Google's search for the world's best computer scientists?

Get 'em while they're hot--er, or before they melt?

Or, thanks to you, get to their page before the server reaches supercritical connection mass from the slashdotting and turns into a melted pool of plastic and silicon substrate leaking through the raised floor in the datacenter.

I know a good concrete guy that can put the sarcophagus over the datacenter if the place explodes...

16000 sacks of shredded paper and 600 million individual scraps of paper seems a bit more demanding task.

Probably most of the same algorithms would apply to both problems.

Well, here's yet another link that says..

But from the outside, it's no noisier than your typical icebox. The noise generated by the Penn State fridge can only be reached when the gas is under tremendous amounts of pressure -- 10 atmospheres worth. If the gas escapes, the pressure dissipates and the sound dies down.

looks like they have Interlingua and Esperanto both of the "planned international auxiliary language" category. But nothing says universal like "planned interplanetary auxiliary language," and it looks likes there's as many Klingon speakers as there are Matsés speakers, so where is it? But I guess they haven't finished the Klingon Shakespeare yet.

They say they'll destroy the data after 3 months. While this whole thing reeks evil to me, at least [they say] they're not going to be storing all this info in perpetuity.

Gun Groups Take Aim at Database
04:45 PM Dec. 01, 1998 PT

.....

The [National Rifle Association] claims that federal law requires the agency to destroy all records immediately after checking a prospective gun buyer's name against its list of people not permitted to purchase weapons.

If the NRA wins in court, the Justice Department will no longer keep personal records, but the FBI's computer will continue to process names before permitting gun purchases -- a system that has other gun-rights groups crying foul.

.....

The Justice Department first proposed storing information on gun purchases for 18 months for audit purposes but recently shortened that to six months following a public outcry.

"The department determined that the general retention period for records of allowed transfers in the NICS Audit Log" should be six months, the agency said in a 30 October statement. It also said that "such information may be retained for a longer period if necessary."

Keeping personal information on file is absolutely necessary, said Nancy Hwa, spokeswoman for the advocacy group Handgun Control.

"We've always favored having a system of licensing and registration in the first place. We should treat guns like cars. If people want to buy [a gun] they should be trained in its use."

Privacy advocates should wake up to the threat of databases of gun owners, said Lisa Dean, vice president of the conservative Free Congress Foundation.

"Privacy groups should take a stand. It's critical that privacy groups look beyond the gun-control issue and start looking at exactly what this is going to mean to them in the future," Dean said. "This is numbering and tracking citizens."

Liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have not opposed the FBI's plan to record personal information about gun buyers. EPIC director Marc Rotenberg likened the plan to driver licensing, adding that privacy safeguards should be in place.

I don't know about MS, but why in the world would IBM do that? "IBM raked in $1.6 billion in intellectual property license fees" in 2000 (value of patents vs. copyrights unknown).

Of course, "raked in" might be overstating it a tad when they had gross revenues of $88 billion that year, but I bet it's basically sheer profit.

"Are we supposed to take it that all of those have been settled (supposedly by paying the RIAA)?"

Most have. A few have been dismissed (the most famous is the grandmother who has a Mac). At least one has countersued. But for the most part they've been paying up.

A good way to avoid being sued by the RIAA is to not dump 1,000 copyrighted songs into your Kazaa share directory. A good rule of thumb is "if you are not sure if you have the right to redistribute something, don't."

Just because someone has a problem with giving their email address to unscrupulous spammers doesn't mean they should start whining to remove freedoms.

IMnsHO the answer is on the receiving end - people should learn not to give out emails to everyone if they don't want to get spammed.

For an interesting article, check out Wired
" In times past, anonymous speech sheltered the Founding Fathers' revolutionary arguments and emboldened commentators such as Mark Twain (aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens) to criticize common ignorance.

Last April, in MacIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, the US Supreme Court reaffirmed that the First Amendment protects the right to anonymous speech. Anonymity, the court reasoned, helps speech stay free. Focusing on political speech - the sort of speech that lies at the core of the First Amendment - the MacIntyre ruling stipulated that restrictions on anonymous political speech must be narrowly tailored and serve an over-riding state interest. "

...he's set up a false dichotomy (100,000 engineers vs 284 million Americans, when it really should be 100,000 engineers vs ~100 major stockholders).

MOD PARENT UP!!!

This is one of the most insightful things I've seen regarding the whole us v them mentality of the fair use advocate v *AA.

I'd love to hear Valenti (who defends an industry that thrives because of piracy) respond to that. And since when is it wrong to have public policy aimed at the 100,000 when the 100,000 are right - and the policy they advocate does nothing to harm the 284 million.

The AOL-TW merger was proposed at $124 Billion.

It ended up going through at either $106 or $109 Billion.

using fossilized hydrocarbon is certainly not the only way to create plastic. Here are some examples:

Plantic Technologies will roll out a cornstarch-based bioplastic wired article
Bioplastic Fantastic
Toyota sees green in 'bioplastics' for cars

This is really really really old news... The University of Washington group that developed this was written up in wired in 1995.

For more on Curl... A lot of big-names are behind it Wired writes" "Curl's development team includes the "father of the Internet" Tim Berners-Lee and MIT tech luminary Stephen Ward. MIT tech guru Michael Dertouzos, who died in August, was also on the team."

How about spyware installed not at your computer, but on your Internet connection? At your ISP for example. Say... Carnivore?

And what if the thing enabling the spying is not reporting back to somewhere, but is just a way to get in?

Is intentionally weak crypto spyware? The NSA limited publicly available key length to 56 bits, explicitly because it's easy to crack, up until 1999.

The Guardian (and several other news outlets) report on the attempt by Professor Paulo Galluci and his team to build a working model of Leonard Da Vinci's clockwork powered car, designed in 1478.

The bigger news here is that the Wired article also contained my obituary!

You know the good ole days weren't always good
And tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems
-Billy Joel

Grrr. What kind of chicken shit randomizing process does Slashdot use to select its stories?

So I find out a company called Forgent Networks is suing over 31 leading software and hardware vendors like Apple, Dell, IBM, Kodak and Xerox over JPEG patents, take the time to find the patent and link it, and my story get rejected. But a "boo hoo I'm stressed" story is accepted. God, I have to get rid of this shit.

(Ah, I love the smell of karma in the morning)

The dot-com crash occured in April of 2000, which is 4 years ago (NASDAQ crash), not 2.5 years ago. This is when the recession started.

Those of a certain political pursuasian like to blame the recession on Bush when it actually started under Clinton, so this misperception is common.

How long before we find out that Time Warner and the rest of the cable companies are collecting viewing data? How long before all networked TV devices are collecting this information?

This is one area where I'm cool with data being collected on me and my habits. In fact I'd like to see better demographic information associated with the viewing data TiVo is collecting. I'd like to see the Neilson ratings go the way of the buggy whip.

Much of the Neilson's data is still collected using a paper and pen. They also employ some more high tech methods but those still require some manual intervention and have produced some questionable results.

And don't forget...
At least five convicted felons secured management positions at a manufacturer of electronic voting machines

1. IBM isn't a monopoly (anymore).

2. IBM's backing of open source isn't just a token gesture, they are fully behind it, from the chips to the software.

It looks like the grandparent's information is coming from this article (or a related one) from December about the audit that uncovered the version problem. This document indicates that version 1.18.18 was certified in November, a month after the October elections in question in the article. Even your document dates to two months after the election.

But for Boats- it apparently works nicely. No need to store or transport the gas, as you're manufacturing it in the vehicle from the surrounding environment.
Wired Article on a sailboat that uses a solar/hydrogen secondary engine, complete with "regenerative sailing" by spining the electric motor when under sail.

ummm.

Tanks with electric force fields - Why not planes?

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,54641,00.ht ml

I'm guessing something to do with the best defense being a good offense..

God damn it you Slashdotters are a bunch of fucking fairies.

Too bad he never really did say that

Burn one to protest John Ashcroft, Theocrat

Seditiously,
Kilgore Trout

Well, maybe not, but while we're on the subject it's worth a look.

Because these machines don't produce a paper trail, it will be almost impossible to catch someone rigging an election. Whatever numbers the computer spits out are the final numbers, that's it. Even when the number of votes is 10 times the number of voters (as in Evansville, IN) there is no way to recount.

There is circumstantial evidence showing election fraud here in Georgia in 2002. Our incumbent Democratic Governor and a Dem incumbent Senator both had 10% leads in the polls the week of the election. Both lost. Warehouse employees have reported that Diebold patched thier systems after the elections board had certified the software on them. Diebold certainly isn't doing the rigging themselves, but their incompetence may be letting someone else do it.

I recently read a great quote from that champion of Democracy, Joseph Stalin - "The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do."

News of the GA 2002 election:
wired.com
scoop.co.nz

-B

You can also read Client study for the state capital Munich, Executive summary of the final report which outlines the options and strategy for the upgrade.

Google points that they haven't deployed yet:

Munich Migration Hits Speed Bump
Munich Linux migration hits serious snags, Users finding Linux learning curve steep, city council calls for investigation
Munich Open Source Plows Ahead

Perhaps someone from Germany could track down the infamous Computerwoche article?

Well, flywheels are used to store kinetic energy. And they can be made pretty darn efficient at it. There was a 1996 article in Discover magazine about a man named Jack Bitterly that wanted to use the darn things to power automobiles. In many ways, that article probably instilled my resolve to later get a degree in engineering.

Here's an "update article" from 2000 in Discover about it.
Re-Energizer

Detroit is rolling out high tech ones too

The press release doesn't say whether it was the full $65million or some smaller amount, or how long Verisign would have to pay. Google News has pointers to one or two versions of the press release, plus Slashdot (:-), plus a Wired article that has the press release but also speculated that the settlement is probably a lot less than the full boat, and some comments on Kremen's attempts to track down the assets of Cohen the name thief.

Do cell phones actually interfere with airliners anyway? I mean c'mon -- are the systems onboard a modern aircraft really so fragile that my cell phone will bother them?

There's an article in this month's Wired that talks about this. Basically, no it wouldn't cause a problem.

Riiiight. Exactly the compassionate, conservative response one would expect.

Burn one to protest The War On Everything

Seditiously,
Kilgore Trout

Supposedly this was Gates rejoinder to Steve Jobs when the latter said, "We're better than you." Gates knows in this case that throwing a bit of cash to Minnesota to settle the suit doesn't really matter, either. It's the same Machiavellian insight as to what it takes to win his grand strategic goals at the cost of a few tactical losses. "Oh, I over charged you for the years between 1994 and 2001? So sorry. Here's a 30% refund in 2004. Thanks for the 70% I get to keep! (And the time I needed to eliminate my competition, hehe...)".