Having read it:) I suspect this CNN article isn't much more than a paraphrase-the-press-release sort of thing. ("A hacker has gained access to as many as 2.2 million Visa and MasterCard accounts, the two companies announced Monday.") Someone else here cites an article saying FIVE million numbers were stolen! I think more probing work is needed.
Also, I love "Both card companies have zero-liability policies, which protect cardholders from being held responsible for unauthorized or fraudulent charges" -- as if they're so generous. For one thing, I think that "policy" is required by federal law, and if not it would be legally insane (and unenforceable) to hold subscribers liable for 3rd party mistakes. An interesting Q might be how long you could wait or fail to notice an ongoing fraudulent use of the card, assuming it didn't get maxed out within minutes.
Anyway, look for more probing articles. I'd like to know what *other* sensitive information might have been accessible? Wouldn't a list of social security numbers be nice? How'd you like to have to go get that number changed? I assume (hope, pray) SSN's weren't stored in the same sloppy way as these CC #'s, but it's perfectly possible at some other institution.
It depends on how they play it: Safari's primary target must be MSIE, the lumbering Spanish galleon of the browser world that Steven Jobs Drake would like pierced below the waterline and off Mac desktops. The Safari/Chimera approach appears to be keeping things light and limber, which is smart I think; it's the hallmark of a good Mac utility app.
But there seems to be a real duplication of effort, when the same folks could be writing open source improvements to Safari (I assume this is feasible? otherwise what's the point of open source). I don't like all the eggs in one basket, and am torn between my pleasure that Apple has reentered the market and my concern that it might undermine it. Safari parallels Chimera so closely -- the sincerest form of flattery.:)
I'm not writing as a developer and don't know anything about the accessibility of Safari development to third parties. I know a % is proprietary -- why don't they open the whole thing? I'm hoping they won't get cute and decide to charge for Safari down the line -- the sort of thing continued development of Chimera (oops, Camino) would protect against. But the, and last, Chimera/Camino is pretty much complete for my purposes, kind of like NS 4.78 was a peak product that is still used places like my public library. If a product meets its purpose....
Bye-bye Opera, my old favorite. And iCab, whatever happened to it.
...but isn't Oak Ridge also infamous as a contaminated site? Any truth to all that? A Google search reveals a war of the cites.
I know similar questions were raised about the Rocky Flats Plant (renamed "Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site" in an Orwellian twist) in Golden, CO (of Coors fame?).
(Another leaky drum example, in northwest DC a few miles from here, they have to be careful when excavation of drums of chemical warfare materials that were misplaced 70 years ago. One wonders how these things happen in the first place.)
Here is a Dec. 2002 DOE press release re cleanup near Y-12. Cleanup is part of the price of nuclear programs, military or civilian.
I'm very loyal to Chimera, but I think it and Safari are pretty close to equivalence. When Safari makes it to 1.2 or so, I don't know what Chimera (or whatever its name will be) will use to distinguish itself. Obviously these coders are good at what they do -- should they work on a "me too" product? Or is there some dramatic advance in browsers that Chimera will make and Safari won't? Right now, it's pretty much what I want save a feature or two, but it's just stubbornness that keeps me from switching to Safari. The developers seem resistant to feature creep -- more power to them. Look at IE (shudder).
To get the version release hung up on a name is pretty lousy. Why the heck did they go with Chimera in the first place, when a 10-second search would have turned up the other? And why the delay to switch? Not that I care... I'm glad they did the project at all, and wish Safari were also (entirely) open source (hello, Apple?).
A new name... hmm, should take aim at Safari... how about Environmentalist? Ecotourist? Bambo?:)
...but have you never sold or returned a present, to get what you really wanted?
So long as Apple would have otherwise rented a jet and Jobs pays taxes, fine. The airplane was originally reported as compensation (right?). If I were to question anything, it would be giving him the plane in the first place, although execs can negotiate pretty freely (the new post-Enron law did ban the multimillion dollar "loan" trick). Jets are often enough used for abuses on the company's tab -- golf "business" trips and the like -- as a way to provide disguised compensation and evade taxation.
Executive compensation gets pretty unbelievable. On the other hand, and unlike typical executives, without Jobs this mutlibillion dollar company would be dead, close to dead, or bought out. (Remember when Michael Dell said if he owned Apple he'd liquidate it to try to give shareholder something back?) Hmm, maybe not a bad quid pro quo.
Fortune Magazine does a nice business in tallying obscenity, check out year 2000.
I share your fondness for the mechanical lever machines that made a racket when you entered your votes for good. I went with my mother when she voted in them in San Francisco, and used them in Ithaca, NY when I lived there a few years ago. There was a great article a while ago in the Times about the machines, which evidently haven't been made for about 50 years, so coming up with parts is challenging. Some places refuse to give them up, even though the new glorified calculators costs less.
Having moved around a bit, I think I've used just about every voting system, except most of these new-fangled things.
It's great you got a chance to play with and verify the performance of one of the scanner. Optical scanners are one of the highest-rated successors to the punchcard, and many Florida counties were already using or switched to them after Election 2000. At least they do leave a paper trail, assuming cause for alarm was raised during the count. They are also much much much cheaper than the electronic kiosks that cost thousands. But as you saw, an innocent configuration error who cause serious problems, especially if it only affected some scanners. Technology sometimes just lets us do stupid things as much higher speed.
You should try making a stink with the City Council (or whatever Boston uses, I'm blanking), write the Globe, that sort of thing. Your experience lends a catchy line to draw attention, something like "Resident Calls Election System 'Looney Tunes'" In my county, we have a system where you press a key and an LED lights up, then a big VOTE button enters the votes. I like using it, but you can imagine the auditability of that. Zero.
Did the machine even catch that Fiorello LaGuardia is dead?;-)
NPR link ("State and local officials buy electronic voting machines in hopes of avoiding the low-tech messiness of pencil marks on paper ballots and so-called "hanging chads." But some computer scientists say vote-counting computers are inaccurate. NPR's Dan Charles reports.")
Now, "inaccurate" isn't quite the right word. Unreliable? Not robust? The problem being tampering, accident, or oversight, not the machines' native ability to add accurately.
* Good for you, to have written.
The thing is that they need a hook of some sort. I don't think they're going to understand how important it is, unfortunately, until there is a tragedy. Similarly, you wouldn't have been able to get them to do a story on your criticisms of Space Shuttle heat shielding until, well, know. We wouldn't even be dumping punchcard ballors en masse -- and switching to electonic systems of questionable pedigree -- if not for Election 2000.
What would be wonderful, if it could be done, would be a comparison of actual voter intent with vote tallies. I know they do test runs (sometimes) but what the public would find compelling is a concrete "you screwed up this election" result. Kind of like the first time DNA shows we executed the worng person.
The errors made with electronic system, more often innocent than malicious, have been amusing so far. When something ugly happens, will we even catch it, let alone see it coming?
The RISKS forum/digest has had many, many articles on the potential and actual snafus of electronic voting; I thing the topic is a special interest of the digest's editor. Although the contributors are very much a part of the technology world, the mood there is pretty virulently anti-electronic voting unless there are old-school audit features such as paper trails. Closed source software is regarded very skeptically.
The most persuasive evidence is the actual experiences coming in from the field, around the planet. Many local governments are buying expensive new systems on surprisingly little information, and we may face problems like Florida's in no time -- but not actually realize it, for lack of auditing. I highly recommend flipping through the archive.
"Votes are transmitted to a central site and kept in the voting machines. They have multiple ways to prevent loss of votes due to power outages as well."
That's the problem -- how do you know those votes were the actual voter choices? Couldn't the system just show you what you want to see, then corrupt the data on purpose or by error?
We have electronic voting also, and it wasn't until I read that particular critique that I realize everything going well only meant that the machines didn't crash. Now I wonder if the machine isn't just humoring me.
A paper receipt, with some kind of paper coded receipt retained by the machine, provides an audit trail. Without it, you're sunk -- although the vote will look orderly....:)
(There are more elaborate proposals for verification, but the good ones all seem to turn on paper. Ironic for the electronic age.)
Soem years ago, the government attempted to come up with its own version of these commercial databases. I forget what it was called, but it was abandoned before I got a chance to play with it. I think that was a mistake. Already many courts are publishing their decisions online, as they should, they're part of the public record. There are lots of little databases forming; I'd like to see them, related into one big one with common formatting conventions, hyperlink, etc.
Westlaw and LexisNexis know the day is coming, and are likely planning for it with their value-added services that are still worthwhile. Think of it as competition in the sense that libraries compete with book sales.
Think more like "Library of Congress" (not too controversial, right?) as electronic reporsitory with staggering performance, then 3rd party commercial/open source/GNU software to access/search/index it. Whatever the precise approach(es), much cheaper and egalitarian.
(And I speak as a former member of the Federal Gubmint, mind you.)
I'm just suggesting this off the top of my head, I'm sure others have thought it out more carefully.
Actually, I'd say that tens of millions sounds pretty cheap.:)
Law is an industry worth billions, and with people willing and able to pay for service. If something could be developed that rivaled Lexis and Westlaw for accuracy and efficiency, even law firms would switch. Even the law librarian author was willing to pay, just not very much. Obviously, though, you'd need to apportion rates by ability to pay, and someone needs a heckuva lot of startup money.
Eventually, we WILL see some sort of national public initiative to do this, and the resource will be taken for granted as the public library. Wasn't it Gingrich who promised to get gov't online? Well, it's not a new idea, it just needs someone behind it.
LII is doing just fine -- but is still a little too "raw." That is, we need nor just the source but to work in better search engines and such not just to make the data more manageable, but to reassure the user they're not overlooking an important item because of a quirk in the search engine.
I cite to LII whenever I want a good, reliable reference to something like a Supreme Court decision or U.S. Code section that anyone can reach and that's not going to get 404'd the next week. I think they're a great step in the right direction. But the search tools are sooo important to anyone serious, and google doesn't cut it (yet).
It's a shame that the gov't doesn't look at the LII and say, gee, we should do this ourselves -- one-stop shopping. Every damn state and federal law and decision and hiccough. Perhaps the indexing and such could take place externally.
I think WestLaw and Lexis are great, but not out of my pocketbook. Ouch.
Though I got tired of hearing about it from Professor M., LII may well prove to be a landmark achievement.
I think "Lexus Nexus" is a car dealer somewhere....:)
Lexis (Nexis is for news; now I guess they're calling themselves LexisNexis) and Westlaw don't have a monopoly (duopoly?) over the public domain information they publish, nor do they just regurgitate public documents. They provide editorial enhancements such as headnotes (flagging various legal issues), in some cases data input (not all of gov't is electronically available, esp. scads of older ones), various ancillary services such as notification when an anticipated case is decided, and, most important of all, a very powerful keyword search engine that blows away any of the free online tools (for example, you can specify how far apart two search terms can be, and other dependencies). You can quickly access hyperlinked services, like a database that will show you every time a given case was mentioned in later decisions, and whether it was mentioned in a good light, disapporvingly, or overruled. These other services are valuable, but could be cheap if they were sold in large volume rather than a select few.
For all this, they are very expensive. Very very expensive. LexisNexis and Westlaw are like a really cool drug that's coming off patent -- now anyone can do it. So let's run them out of business. I think it's a great idea, but we have to pay for somehow. For example, I'm surprised the author give short shrift to the laborious OCR scanning these companies did of old cases. Not only do the cases have to be scanned, but the resulting files have to be marked up for things like page numbers. The information is free, copying it is not -- even RMS says that.
It is more urgent than the author makes it out to be: it is becoming nearly imperitive to have access to these databases to practice law. Judges really do expect you to know about that case that came down 12 hours ago. The volume of decisions published increses exponentially. When the time required to hunt down the books becomes more expensive than the cost of using the database, a rich firm luxury becomes critical.
I think we shouldn't ask "how can we force these guys to lower prices" but "why isn't there an affordable public database of this material". Not just a server crammed with decisions, but also an affordable method of searching it. There is just so much data now that the Library of Congress card catalog is obsolete.
It would not be too much to expect the subscriber to contribute their own processing power to the task, or even to somehow distribute encrypted duplicates of various documents around the Net to make a huge, redundant, high performance database. Besides helping litiagants, this would also help the courts by fostering better lawyering, and help the people to learn about the law for itself.
Why not do it right now? Oh yeah, this would be really expensive. But as firms like Google have shown, there are high-performance distributed solutions that work.
According to this article (in "Ad Age" -- and pretty good, what do you know), the FCC is planing to follow FTC's lead. And FTC sounds quite eager, after getting 50,000 complaint letters (that beats 50,000 calls). There is a jurisdictional distinction between the two agencies, but if they act in union they will be able to cover a spectrum of industries from banking to satellite TV to your local used car salesperson and so on.
Does anyone have any details on the likely legal challenges? I know the industry filed in anticipation of the legislation, arguing First Amendment and loss of jobs. I'm willing to listen to the first; but the second? C'mon guys, you had your chance on that one with Congress. Anyway, I'd like to see the actual complaint or motion for injunction, now that the issue is coming to a head. At the very least I would expect litigation to delay implementation of the DNC list.
Everything I see appears to think it will be driven by telemarketer fees. Presumably the FTC *will* need some nominal funding up front to set it up. The article is badly written on this point. I wouldn't worry much, $16 million is peanuts out of $2+ trillion budget, I think they can scare up the money from the office supply funds.
That's an interesting question. If would be speech, but would it be free? If you called once privately, probably not harassment. If you called repeatedly, probably harassment. If you called once as a member of a campaign to call this person, probably harassment (conspiracy).
A letter, though, would be appropriate. Not that judges are supposed to respond to public opinion in the slightest.
Actually, my point was slightly different -- I don't know whether a lot of people realize that we have a lot more rights than the Constitution grants us, because we added them. So what Congress giveth, it can legally take away. The slippery slope argument is usually a canard because often we have to find a balance between purpose X (e.g., "privacy") and purpose Y (e.g., "law enforcement") rather than discard one or the other. So saying "slippery slope" warns of a risk but does not point to a solution.
Here, Congress giveth, preempting a court test of the plan for suspicionless spying on citizens. I suppose many perceived that the ridiculousness of the proposal would have been a deal-killer, provoking a fight that would have taken down the entire Act, so maybe we're a shade worse off this way. Right now the folks proposing this stuff generally believe they're doing the right and popular thing, and the polls back them up. There's actually a broad if not deep public support for stuff like letting the government read email and otherwise limiting civil liberties, far more than before 9/11 challenged their complacency.
I do feel a part of my country rather than its opponent and take responsibility for what it does. I don't control it and can't change it (probably for the best!) but I did waste my time writing real, paper letters to the President, our Senators, and our Representative, something I've never done before. They're on the desk, and they're not specifically about this misdirected antiterrorism initiative, though it does come up. There's another more pressing policy initiative that bothers me more than Patriotgate.
Never take anything for granted: Write your friendly elected representative. Some staffer really reads all of the mail (not just to look for threats) and tallies the sentiment. Selected letters are forwarded to someone in charge. At least, I hope I'm doing more than provide filler for my FBI file.:)
Thank goodness for the handful of sensible people in Congress. When the Patriot Act sailed through with only one dissenter in the Senate (Feingold/Wis.) I wondered whether I had lost my mind.
You might point out that we have had no real acts of domestic terrorism since September 2001. True.
You probably don't live in the DC area, but we remember the anthrax attacks following 9/11. Still unsolved, aren't they? Then we had these bastard snipers killing a dozen unsuspecting people... one at a time... over a period of weeks. When you find yourself wondering whether you're taking a risk by opening the mail or merely standing outside, you have problems. You have terror.
Mentioned rarely, these attacks were likely all the work of Americans. So was Oklahoma City. The closest thing to a 9/11 follow-up was the "shoe bomber" Reid, a British subject. (Apparently they're worried about him in jail.) Hunting for "suspicious foreigners" would have done no good in any of these. Nor would the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I'm not certain what would have helped, but I am sure they're headed in the wrong direction, enacting the longtime wish list of certain interest groups without regard to the present problem.
We don't want to live in a police state, both because it would suck and because the terrorists would love it.
Now we have a code red or orange or tangerine, I forget, isn't that dandy. I understood the defcon system better.
Fair enough. But there's no alternate way to interpret Ex Post Facto -- either you've got it or its repealed. Also, I'd assume the Due Process Clause (in its modern substantive form) would raise some major objections. How the heck do you comply with a law not yet written?
The basic idea was that the Framers vehemently didn't want the legislature supplanting the judiciary by inventing crimes or creating punishments. (There's a Bill of Attainder companion clause addressing punishments.)
Never take anything for granted in constitutional law. But the problem we face in some areas is that the law has allowed us greater freedom than the constitutional strictly requires. That latitude is being pared back, legally if not wisely.
Well, there is an "obviousness" exception, related to prior art. Shouldn't that take out most of this? People have been doing keyword searches since the invention of the index, for example.
The nonobvious exception is of course nonobvious in appplication. And the USPTO doesn't always get it right -- though the eventual litigation might.:)
The FBI routinely sets a high threshold before it will get involved, and it sounds unfair until you consider they are *tiny* compared to local law enforcement. Similarly, the entire federal judiciary has fewer judges than California.
Did you look at state law remedies, call the attorney general, that sort of thing? I'm not faulting you if you didn't, I'm just ignornant of whether there a meaningful alternatives.
You could have sued the guy personally in small claims, although the dollar value was low. But there's nothing wrong with a little spite.:)
A remedy that stops short of recovering 100% of ill-gotten gain is not draconian. It is inadequate.
Obviously, I was kidding about the 10%. It just points up that an arbitrary percentage fine may miss the boat. Microsoft can pay the fine and continue to profit; it could even view the fine as a sort of tax and shrug. A hypothetical 20% profit margin is quite profitable.
As to the actual remedy, one would need to estimate the improper gain was, who it whould go to, and what should be done to govern Microsoft's future conduct, including remedies for violations. I would rather see any recovery distributed to the victims, the point is not merely to injure Microsoft.
In the spirit on "guilty until proved innocent," note that nothing has yet been proven. Not *everything* bad said about Microsoft is accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
Having read it :) I suspect this CNN article isn't much more than a paraphrase-the-press-release sort of thing. ("A hacker has gained access to as many as 2.2 million Visa and MasterCard accounts, the two companies announced Monday.") Someone else here cites an article saying FIVE million numbers were stolen! I think more probing work is needed.
Also, I love "Both card companies have zero-liability policies, which protect cardholders from being held responsible for unauthorized or fraudulent charges" -- as if they're so generous. For one thing, I think that "policy" is required by federal law, and if not it would be legally insane (and unenforceable) to hold subscribers liable for 3rd party mistakes. An interesting Q might be how long you could wait or fail to notice an ongoing fraudulent use of the card, assuming it didn't get maxed out within minutes.
Anyway, look for more probing articles. I'd like to know what *other* sensitive information might have been accessible? Wouldn't a list of social security numbers be nice? How'd you like to have to go get that number changed? I assume (hope, pray) SSN's weren't stored in the same sloppy way as these CC #'s, but it's perfectly possible at some other institution.
they have to measure the dead animals with geiger counters (as well as weight them and the usual) before letting them go
:)
Isn't letting a dead animal go kind of futile? Or maybe at ORNL the animals never really die....
Maybe I watch too much of The Simpsons.
It depends on how they play it: Safari's primary target must be MSIE, the lumbering Spanish galleon of the browser world that Steven Jobs Drake would like pierced below the waterline and off Mac desktops. The Safari/Chimera approach appears to be keeping things light and limber, which is smart I think; it's the hallmark of a good Mac utility app.
:)
But there seems to be a real duplication of effort, when the same folks could be writing open source improvements to Safari (I assume this is feasible? otherwise what's the point of open source). I don't like all the eggs in one basket, and am torn between my pleasure that Apple has reentered the market and my concern that it might undermine it. Safari parallels Chimera so closely -- the sincerest form of flattery.
I'm not writing as a developer and don't know anything about the accessibility of Safari development to third parties. I know a % is proprietary -- why don't they open the whole thing? I'm hoping they won't get cute and decide to charge for Safari down the line -- the sort of thing continued development of Chimera (oops, Camino) would protect against. But the, and last, Chimera/Camino is pretty much complete for my purposes, kind of like NS 4.78 was a peak product that is still used places like my public library. If a product meets its purpose....
Bye-bye Opera, my old favorite. And iCab, whatever happened to it.
...but isn't Oak Ridge also infamous as a contaminated site? Any truth to all that? A Google search reveals a war of the cites.
I know similar questions were raised about the Rocky Flats Plant (renamed "Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site" in an Orwellian twist) in Golden, CO (of Coors fame?).
(Another leaky drum example, in northwest DC a few miles from here, they have to be careful when excavation of drums of chemical warfare materials that were misplaced 70 years ago. One wonders how these things happen in the first place.)
Here is a Dec. 2002 DOE press release re cleanup near Y-12. Cleanup is part of the price of nuclear programs, military or civilian.
I'm very loyal to Chimera, but I think it and Safari are pretty close to equivalence. When Safari makes it to 1.2 or so, I don't know what Chimera (or whatever its name will be) will use to distinguish itself. Obviously these coders are good at what they do -- should they work on a "me too" product? Or is there some dramatic advance in browsers that Chimera will make and Safari won't? Right now, it's pretty much what I want save a feature or two, but it's just stubbornness that keeps me from switching to Safari. The developers seem resistant to feature creep -- more power to them. Look at IE (shudder).
... I'm glad they did the project at all, and wish Safari were also (entirely) open source (hello, Apple?).
... hmm, should take aim at Safari ... how about Environmentalist? Ecotourist? Bambo? :)
To get the version release hung up on a name is pretty lousy. Why the heck did they go with Chimera in the first place, when a 10-second search would have turned up the other? And why the delay to switch? Not that I care
A new name
...but have you never sold or returned a present, to get what you really wanted?
So long as Apple would have otherwise rented a jet and Jobs pays taxes, fine. The airplane was originally reported as compensation (right?). If I were to question anything, it would be giving him the plane in the first place, although execs can negotiate pretty freely (the new post-Enron law did ban the multimillion dollar "loan" trick). Jets are often enough used for abuses on the company's tab -- golf "business" trips and the like -- as a way to provide disguised compensation and evade taxation.
Executive compensation gets pretty unbelievable. On the other hand, and unlike typical executives, without Jobs this mutlibillion dollar company would be dead, close to dead, or bought out. (Remember when Michael Dell said if he owned Apple he'd liquidate it to try to give shareholder something back?) Hmm, maybe not a bad quid pro quo.
Fortune Magazine does a nice business in tallying obscenity, check out year 2000.
I share your fondness for the mechanical lever machines that made a racket when you entered your votes for good. I went with my mother when she voted in them in San Francisco, and used them in Ithaca, NY when I lived there a few years ago. There was a great article a while ago in the Times about the machines, which evidently haven't been made for about 50 years, so coming up with parts is challenging. Some places refuse to give them up, even though the new glorified calculators costs less.
;-)
Having moved around a bit, I think I've used just about every voting system, except most of these new-fangled things.
It's great you got a chance to play with and verify the performance of one of the scanner. Optical scanners are one of the highest-rated successors to the punchcard, and many Florida counties were already using or switched to them after Election 2000. At least they do leave a paper trail, assuming cause for alarm was raised during the count. They are also much much much cheaper than the electronic kiosks that cost thousands. But as you saw, an innocent configuration error who cause serious problems, especially if it only affected some scanners. Technology sometimes just lets us do stupid things as much higher speed.
You should try making a stink with the City Council (or whatever Boston uses, I'm blanking), write the Globe, that sort of thing. Your experience lends a catchy line to draw attention, something like "Resident Calls Election System 'Looney Tunes'" In my county, we have a system where you press a key and an LED lights up, then a big VOTE button enters the votes. I like using it, but you can imagine the auditability of that. Zero.
Did the machine even catch that Fiorello LaGuardia is dead?
NPR link ("State and local officials buy electronic voting machines in hopes of avoiding the low-tech messiness of pencil marks on paper ballots and so-called "hanging chads." But some computer scientists say vote-counting computers are inaccurate. NPR's Dan Charles reports.")
Now, "inaccurate" isn't quite the right word. Unreliable? Not robust? The problem being tampering, accident, or oversight, not the machines' native ability to add accurately.
*
Good for you, to have written.
The thing is that they need a hook of some sort. I don't think they're going to understand how important it is, unfortunately, until there is a tragedy. Similarly, you wouldn't have been able to get them to do a story on your criticisms of Space Shuttle heat shielding until, well, know. We wouldn't even be dumping punchcard ballors en masse -- and switching to electonic systems of questionable pedigree -- if not for Election 2000.
What would be wonderful, if it could be done, would be a comparison of actual voter intent with vote tallies. I know they do test runs (sometimes) but what the public would find compelling is a concrete "you screwed up this election" result. Kind of like the first time DNA shows we executed the worng person.
The errors made with electronic system, more often innocent than malicious, have been amusing so far. When something ugly happens, will we even catch it, let alone see it coming?
The RISKS forum/digest has had many, many articles on the potential and actual snafus of electronic voting; I thing the topic is a special interest of the digest's editor. Although the contributors are very much a part of the technology world, the mood there is pretty virulently anti-electronic voting unless there are old-school audit features such as paper trails. Closed source software is regarded very skeptically.
The most persuasive evidence is the actual experiences coming in from the field, around the planet. Many local governments are buying expensive new systems on surprisingly little information, and we may face problems like Florida's in no time -- but not actually realize it, for lack of auditing. I highly recommend flipping through the archive.
How do you know your system "did very well"?
:)
"Votes are transmitted to a central site and kept in the voting machines. They have multiple ways to prevent loss of votes due to power outages as well."
That's the problem -- how do you know those votes were the actual voter choices? Couldn't the system just show you what you want to see, then corrupt the data on purpose or by error?
We have electronic voting also, and it wasn't until I read that particular critique that I realize everything going well only meant that the machines didn't crash. Now I wonder if the machine isn't just humoring me.
A paper receipt, with some kind of paper coded receipt retained by the machine, provides an audit trail. Without it, you're sunk -- although the vote will look orderly....
(There are more elaborate proposals for verification, but the good ones all seem to turn on paper. Ironic for the electronic age.)
Soem years ago, the government attempted to come up with its own version of these commercial databases. I forget what it was called, but it was abandoned before I got a chance to play with it. I think that was a mistake. Already many courts are publishing their decisions online, as they should, they're part of the public record. There are lots of little databases forming; I'd like to see them, related into one big one with common formatting conventions, hyperlink, etc.
Westlaw and LexisNexis know the day is coming, and are likely planning for it with their value-added services that are still worthwhile. Think of it as competition in the sense that libraries compete with book sales.
Don't worry, either you or holy "Jebus" --
Think more like "Library of Congress" (not too controversial, right?) as electronic reporsitory with staggering performance, then 3rd party commercial/open source/GNU software to access/search/index it. Whatever the precise approach(es), much cheaper and egalitarian.
(And I speak as a former member of the Federal Gubmint, mind you.)
I'm just suggesting this off the top of my head, I'm sure others have thought it out more carefully.
Actually, I'd say that tens of millions sounds pretty cheap. :)
Law is an industry worth billions, and with people willing and able to pay for service. If something could be developed that rivaled Lexis and Westlaw for accuracy and efficiency, even law firms would switch. Even the law librarian author was willing to pay, just not very much. Obviously, though, you'd need to apportion rates by ability to pay, and someone needs a heckuva lot of startup money.
Eventually, we WILL see some sort of national public initiative to do this, and the resource will be taken for granted as the public library. Wasn't it Gingrich who promised to get gov't online? Well, it's not a new idea, it just needs someone behind it.
LII is doing just fine -- but is still a little too "raw." That is, we need nor just the source but to work in better search engines and such not just to make the data more manageable, but to reassure the user they're not overlooking an important item because of a quirk in the search engine.
I cite to LII whenever I want a good, reliable reference to something like a Supreme Court decision or U.S. Code section that anyone can reach and that's not going to get 404'd the next week. I think they're a great step in the right direction. But the search tools are sooo important to anyone serious, and google doesn't cut it (yet).
It's a shame that the gov't doesn't look at the LII and say, gee, we should do this ourselves -- one-stop shopping. Every damn state and federal law and decision and hiccough. Perhaps the indexing and such could take place externally.
I think WestLaw and Lexis are great, but not out of my pocketbook. Ouch.
Though I got tired of hearing about it from Professor M., LII may well prove to be a landmark achievement.
I think "Lexus Nexus" is a car dealer somewhere.... :)
Lexis (Nexis is for news; now I guess they're calling themselves LexisNexis) and Westlaw don't have a monopoly (duopoly?) over the public domain information they publish, nor do they just regurgitate public documents. They provide editorial enhancements such as headnotes (flagging various legal issues), in some cases data input (not all of gov't is electronically available, esp. scads of older ones), various ancillary services such as notification when an anticipated case is decided, and, most important of all, a very powerful keyword search engine that blows away any of the free online tools (for example, you can specify how far apart two search terms can be, and other dependencies). You can quickly access hyperlinked services, like a database that will show you every time a given case was mentioned in later decisions, and whether it was mentioned in a good light, disapporvingly, or overruled. These other services are valuable, but could be cheap if they were sold in large volume rather than a select few.
For all this, they are very expensive. Very very expensive. LexisNexis and Westlaw are like a really cool drug that's coming off patent -- now anyone can do it. So let's run them out of business. I think it's a great idea, but we have to pay for somehow. For example, I'm surprised the author give short shrift to the laborious OCR scanning these companies did of old cases. Not only do the cases have to be scanned, but the resulting files have to be marked up for things like page numbers. The information is free, copying it is not -- even RMS says that.
It is more urgent than the author makes it out to be: it is becoming nearly imperitive to have access to these databases to practice law. Judges really do expect you to know about that case that came down 12 hours ago. The volume of decisions published increses exponentially. When the time required to hunt down the books becomes more expensive than the cost of using the database, a rich firm luxury becomes critical.
I think we shouldn't ask "how can we force these guys to lower prices" but "why isn't there an affordable public database of this material". Not just a server crammed with decisions, but also an affordable method of searching it. There is just so much data now that the Library of Congress card catalog is obsolete.
It would not be too much to expect the subscriber to contribute their own processing power to the task, or even to somehow distribute encrypted duplicates of various documents around the Net to make a huge, redundant, high performance database. Besides helping litiagants, this would also help the courts by fostering better lawyering, and help the people to learn about the law for itself.
Why not do it right now? Oh yeah, this would be really expensive. But as firms like Google have shown, there are high-performance distributed solutions that work.
According to this article (in "Ad Age" -- and pretty good, what do you know), the FCC is planing to follow FTC's lead. And FTC sounds quite eager, after getting 50,000 complaint letters (that beats 50,000 calls). There is a jurisdictional distinction between the two agencies, but if they act in union they will be able to cover a spectrum of industries from banking to satellite TV to your local used car salesperson and so on.
Does anyone have any details on the likely legal challenges? I know the industry filed in anticipation of the legislation, arguing First Amendment and loss of jobs. I'm willing to listen to the first; but the second? C'mon guys, you had your chance on that one with Congress. Anyway, I'd like to see the actual complaint or motion for injunction, now that the issue is coming to a head. At the very least I would expect litigation to delay implementation of the DNC list.
Everything I see appears to think it will be driven by telemarketer fees. Presumably the FTC *will* need some nominal funding up front to set it up. The article is badly written on this point. I wouldn't worry much, $16 million is peanuts out of $2+ trillion budget, I think they can scare up the money from the office supply funds.
That's an interesting question. If would be speech, but would it be free? If you called once privately, probably not harassment. If you called repeatedly, probably harassment. If you called once as a member of a campaign to call this person, probably harassment (conspiracy).
A letter, though, would be appropriate. Not that judges are supposed to respond to public opinion in the slightest.
Actually, my point was slightly different -- I don't know whether a lot of people realize that we have a lot more rights than the Constitution grants us, because we added them. So what Congress giveth, it can legally take away. The slippery slope argument is usually a canard because often we have to find a balance between purpose X (e.g., "privacy") and purpose Y (e.g., "law enforcement") rather than discard one or the other. So saying "slippery slope" warns of a risk but does not point to a solution.
:)
Here, Congress giveth, preempting a court test of the plan for suspicionless spying on citizens. I suppose many perceived that the ridiculousness of the proposal would have been a deal-killer, provoking a fight that would have taken down the entire Act, so maybe we're a shade worse off this way. Right now the folks proposing this stuff generally believe they're doing the right and popular thing, and the polls back them up. There's actually a broad if not deep public support for stuff like letting the government read email and otherwise limiting civil liberties, far more than before 9/11 challenged their complacency.
I do feel a part of my country rather than its opponent and take responsibility for what it does. I don't control it and can't change it (probably for the best!) but I did waste my time writing real, paper letters to the President, our Senators, and our Representative, something I've never done before. They're on the desk, and they're not specifically about this misdirected antiterrorism initiative, though it does come up. There's another more pressing policy initiative that bothers me more than Patriotgate.
Never take anything for granted: Write your friendly elected representative. Some staffer really reads all of the mail (not just to look for threats) and tallies the sentiment. Selected letters are forwarded to someone in charge. At least, I hope I'm doing more than provide filler for my FBI file.
Thank goodness for the handful of sensible people in Congress. When the Patriot Act sailed through with only one dissenter in the Senate (Feingold/Wis.) I wondered whether I had lost my mind.
... one at a time ... over a period of weeks. When you find yourself wondering whether you're taking a risk by opening the mail or merely standing outside, you have problems. You have terror.
You might point out that we have had no real acts of domestic terrorism since September 2001. True.
You probably don't live in the DC area, but we remember the anthrax attacks following 9/11. Still unsolved, aren't they? Then we had these bastard snipers killing a dozen unsuspecting people
Mentioned rarely, these attacks were likely all the work of Americans. So was Oklahoma City. The closest thing to a 9/11 follow-up was the "shoe bomber" Reid, a British subject. (Apparently they're worried about him in jail.) Hunting for "suspicious foreigners" would have done no good in any of these. Nor would the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I'm not certain what would have helped, but I am sure they're headed in the wrong direction, enacting the longtime wish list of certain interest groups without regard to the present problem.
We don't want to live in a police state, both because it would suck and because the terrorists would love it.
Now we have a code red or orange or tangerine, I forget, isn't that dandy. I understood the defcon system better.
Fair enough. But there's no alternate way to interpret Ex Post Facto -- either you've got it or its repealed. Also, I'd assume the Due Process Clause (in its modern substantive form) would raise some major objections. How the heck do you comply with a law not yet written?
The basic idea was that the Framers vehemently didn't want the legislature supplanting the judiciary by inventing crimes or creating punishments. (There's a Bill of Attainder companion clause addressing punishments.)
Never take anything for granted in constitutional law. But the problem we face in some areas is that the law has allowed us greater freedom than the constitutional strictly requires. That latitude is being pared back, legally if not wisely.
Well, there is an "obviousness" exception, related to prior art. Shouldn't that take out most of this? People have been doing keyword searches since the invention of the index, for example.
:)
The nonobvious exception is of course nonobvious in appplication. And the USPTO doesn't always get it right -- though the eventual litigation might.
Certainly this sort of discussion is nothing new.
Yeah, I noticed it afterwards -- like all typos.
Maybe I was thinking "guns and butter"?
The FBI routinely sets a high threshold before it will get involved, and it sounds unfair until you consider they are *tiny* compared to local law enforcement. Similarly, the entire federal judiciary has fewer judges than California.
:)
Did you look at state law remedies, call the attorney general, that sort of thing? I'm not faulting you if you didn't, I'm just ignornant of whether there a meaningful alternatives.
You could have sued the guy personally in small claims, although the dollar value was low. But there's nothing wrong with a little spite.
A remedy that stops short of recovering 100% of ill-gotten gain is not draconian. It is inadequate.
Obviously, I was kidding about the 10%. It just points up that an arbitrary percentage fine may miss the boat. Microsoft can pay the fine and continue to profit; it could even view the fine as a sort of tax and shrug. A hypothetical 20% profit margin is quite profitable.
As to the actual remedy, one would need to estimate the improper gain was, who it whould go to, and what should be done to govern Microsoft's future conduct, including remedies for violations. I would rather see any recovery distributed to the victims, the point is not merely to injure Microsoft.
In the spirit on "guilty until proved innocent," note that nothing has yet been proven. Not *everything* bad said about Microsoft is accurate.