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Diebold’s AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

/ Security

A few days ago Ed Felton announced he and his students had released a detailed security analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine. The executive summary and/or demonstration video is well worth a look, and the full research paper is a must-read for anyone interested in computer security.

By later that day, the president of Diebold Election Systems had issued a rebuttal. I’m a security dabbler, not an expert, but to my semi-trained eye the rebuttal looks like a bunch of smoke. I’m looking forward to hearing the Princeton authors’ response [Update 9/22: posted here], but while I’m waiting for that here’s my own take on it:

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Breaking iTunes Music Store DRM

/ Intellectual Property

A couple weeks ago QTFairUse was ported to iTunes 6. Yes, it was just in time for Apple to release iTunes 7, but it looks like it’s also working at least for on music purchased with iTunes 7 as well.

Unfortunately, it’s Windows only (and still a little unstable I gather), but hopefully this means JHymn will soon be updated to work on the latest iTunes. Then maybe I’ll actually start purchasing from the iTunes Music Store again…

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Comments enabled again

/ Uncategorized

My apologies for comments being broken for so long on this site. Spammers were pounding the comments script, and we had to remove it entirely just to keep the server from being brought to its knees. (I still get around 1000 attempts per day, even though the script has been gone a month or more.)

Comments are now working again, with a new JavaScript hack that disguises the script name itself. It’s an easy hack to get around, but I’m hoping not enough people are using this particular hack that spammers have found it worth it to automate a work-around.

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Subliminals in my spam

/ Media Technology

subliminal-spam-buy.jpg This may be old hat to some of you, but it was new to me — I just got an email spam that includes subliminals. The whole ad is an animated GIF designed such that the word BUY! flashes over the email for a split second every 30 seconds (including briefly as the email loads). I doubt this’ll actually make the spam any more effective (and in this case it’s a stock-push-scam, so the spammer-scammer won’t know either), but it’s interesting to see what they’re up to these days.

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It’s the reality, stupid!

/ Politics

Haven’t we heard this song before?

Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers are voicing anger that American spy agencies have not issued more ominous warnings about the threats that they say Iran presents to the United States.

Some policy makers have accused intelligence agencies of playing down Iran’s role in Hezbollah’s recent attacks against Israel and overestimating the time it would take for Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

It’s the reality, stupid! Read More »

Google acquires image-classification company

/ Media Technology

From a blog post by Google’s Picasa Product Manager:

Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don’t have any specific features to show off today, but we’re looking forward to having more to share with you soon.

Neven Vision’s page now redirects to the Google blog post, but a cached copy in The Wayback Machine indicates they’ve been focusing on face recognition technology of late, and C|NET mentions their iScout software for mobile phones that uses images shot with a camera phone to access additional content. (Link via John Battelle’s Searchblog, with some nice extra info at SearchEngineWatch.)

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No more kings…

/ Big Brother

From today’s district court ruling that the NSA warrantless wiretapping program is illegal:

The Government appears to argue here that, pursuant to the penumbra of Constitutional language in Article II, and particularly because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself.

We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all “inherent powers” must derive from that Constitution.

…

The President of the United States, a creature of the same Constitution which gave us these [the First and Fourth] Amendments, has undisputedly violated the Fourth in failing to procure judicial orders as required by FISA, and accordingly has violated the First Amendment Rights of these Plaintiffs as well.

No more kings… Read More »