Archives for: October 2004
Oct
31
Ed Felten has launched an evoting experts blog at evoting-experts.com. I'll be joinging Adam Stubblefield, Avi Rubin, Dan Wallach, David Dill and Ed there to address problems as they come up in the 2004 election. This will be a great site for as-it-ha… more »
Oct
31
Americans learned in 2000 that watching recounts and courts decide a piano-wire tight election -- like the making of laws -- is not for the faint-hearted.
Yet four years later, they're as fixated as spectators at a train wreck. Thousands in fact are… more »
Oct
28
In addition to other really scary costumes for Halloween, our local halloween shop in Berkeley has some really weird ones... like fat stripper suits, large genitalia, beer bottles and even a milk carton hat: more »
Oct
28
Thanks to Rob for letting us flex our server muscle in prep. for E-Day (note, I didn't write "Joe from EFF"... I would have preferred "Joe, EFF groupie"...):
Joe from the EFF writes "Verified Voting has just gone live with a number of tools for all y… more »
Oct
28
(Donna (at EFF's DeepLinks) always knows what's up...)
Mypollingplace.com is here to help.
AP has the scoop:
With most states reporting massive new voter registrations and many political observers worrying about potential voter confusion and… more »
Oct
27
This movie (MOV) is about 1.0 MB. more »
Oct
27
You heard it here first, folks. Jason Schultz will be teaching the Cyberlaw course at Boalt Hall this spring. Jason's an attorney and awesome litigator at the EFF and also Boalt alum (not to mention that he blogs it up at LawGeek and Copyfight). It's… more »
Oct
26
Kim @ Wired News: "E-Vote Vendors Hand Over Software"
elections, certification/testing, reform, vendors, standards, news, open sourceA story from the coolest journalist, Kim, at Wired News:
In an effort to increase the integrity of next week's presidential election, five voting machine makers agreed for the first time to submit their software to the National Software Reference Lib… more »
Oct
26
Designing Security into Campaign System Architecture
system, elections, accessibility, news, politics, problemsFrom a story at Wired News:
SFGate has not been alone in seeing markedly increased traffic in recent weeks. In fact, while experts aren't sure if internet-wide traffic is up as a result of the election, it is certain that a wide range of sites have s… more »
Oct
26
Ed Felten notes a reccuring problem in early voting in a number of states (Texas, New Mexico and Florida) where people think they chose one candidate but the ballot review screen shows the machine registered a vote for another candidate. Felten goes on… more »
Oct
25
From an engineering standpoint, the new design of LAMP is overly complex, fragile, and inefficient. That's not surprising, because lawyers must have had a big impact on the design.
There's got to be a market in regulatory arbitrage... that is, mayb… more »
Oct
24
A couple quick news items:
We just submitted a paper I co-authored (in collaboration with the folks at the OVC), "A PC-Based Open-Source Voting Machine with an Accessible Voter-Verifiable Paper Ballot" (PDF), to the USENIX 2005 FREENIX track.
Yo… more »
Oct
24
Michelle and I recently went to San Francisco's Autum Moon Festival... our favorite part is, of course, the yearly acknowledgment that lotus moon cakes are they best (although we prefer the flaky-dough over cakey-dough variety.).
Here's a bunch of ph… more »
Oct
21
The problems in Ohio continue. There is a serious problem with the punchcard ballot design layout for absentee ballots in Cleveland, Ohio.
CLEVELAND (AP) -- Absentee voters in the most populous county of a critical state in the presidential election… more »
Oct
21
Voting glitches involving electronic or other voting machines
Litigation over which provisional ballots are valid
A fight over the Colorado amendment to split the electoral vote
A tie in the electoral college or a faithless elector
A terrori… more »
Oct
20
Ohio is very interesting case study in election administration right now.
The Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, is being sued for requiring that voters who cast provisional ballots in the wrong precinct can't have their votes counted. The SoS los… more »
Oct
20
I like words that you can type with one hand... like "punk".
Judd mentioned that the longest term that you can type with one hand is "stewardesses" and on the right hand "hypolimnion"... however, that doesn't mean anything to us. The next best optio… more »
Oct
20
Oh man, we're less than two weeks from the election and already the Election Incident Reporting System is getting a ton of data via calls to 1-866-OUR-VOTE. They should probably re-adjust their color pallate to ensure that the whole country isn't all re… more »
Oct
19
There might be a rather subtle problem in Boulder, Colorado. Specifically, ballots have serial numbers on them.
The $1.4 million system from Hart InterCivic replaced the county's punch-card voting machines this year. It requires voters to fill out p… more »
Oct
19
Laura Quilter (Boalt fellow) disects the claim that the Mary Cheney reference was a "low blow".
This is bullshit, a fake issue.
Read at its absolutely most significant, it affects the following small populations of people: (a) people who would vot… more »
Oct
19
Judd questions the praise given to Jon Stewart lately for his appearance on Crossfire (also check out this debriefing (MOV) on the Daily Show and some of the Crossfire response):
While I give credit to Jon for sticking to his guns, I don't see wh… more »
Oct
17
Picked up a new t-shirt on Telegraph Ave. the other day (from disarmbushtshirts.com)... best $10 I've ever spent: more »
Oct
17
The image above is of B.K.S. Iyengar in full lotus and namasté.
I've done Iyengar yoga off-and-on for about ten years. Lately, it's been more off than on. Although, strangely enough, during the past couple of weeks, I've been returning… more »
Oct
17
So, I went to pick up my M.A. in astrophysics the other day... like Scott, I found it had Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature on it:
Funny, notice I took this shot during one of Cheney's two-minute diatribes in the vice-presidential debate. more »
Oct
17
Background: Michelle and I purchased this 2002 Chilean Merlot made by Viu Manent (Colchagua, Chilé) from Vino! in Oakland for $8.95. A sign in Vino! said that Wine Enthusiast gives it an 89 point score (the closest I could find was this Wine Spec… more »
Oct
16
(via Derek here)
Diebold will pay $125,000 to the EFF. Apparently, this will cover the costs of the case. And we all got some tasty precedent along the way.
From the EFF release:
Diebold is the first company to be held liable for violatin… more »
Oct
16
Joe's got the skinny on the Sony C&D of Retropod... and how Sony would likely loose if they pursued this under trademark law. more »
Oct
15
(just saw this via Aaron here)
[Jon] Stewart on Crossfire
One of the most incredible sights of this political season:
BitTorrent download
Transcript, but your really have to watch it
Jon Stewart goes on Crossfire, one of our vapid polit… more »
Oct
15
The Government Accountability Office (formerly the General Accounting Office) has released a new report today: "Department of Justice's Activities to Address Past Election-Related Voting Irregularities." In short, the DOJ's Voting Section is screwed and… more »
Oct
13
(via Ryan) R.Robot is an algorithm that writes it's own blog...
We must rebuild sober duty. more »
Oct
13
This is the cover of the current issue of the Heuristic Squelch... a satirical magazine run by a slew of UC Berkeley students. It's quite the funny publication... more »
Oct
13
FireFox and Thunderbird 1.0 will be released on November 9:
I can exclusively reveal that the weekend of the 19th-21st of November has been chosen as Party Time. That's after the currently-planned release date for Firefox 1.0 - the 9th - and allows f… more »
Oct
12
It's not hard to predict what President Bush, who sounds increasingly desperate, will say tomorrow. Here are eight lies or distortions you'll hear, and the truth about each: more »
Oct
12
This just in: the Supreme Court has denied cert in RIAA v. Verizon, the case in which the recording industry initially won the right to unmask an anonymous KaZaA user with a special non-judicial, PATRIOT Act-like subpoena under the DMCA. The DC Circui… more »
Oct
12
UC Berkeley SIMS and EECS professor, Doug Tygar has just started a blogger blog: tygar-blog. more »
Oct
11
**UPDATE [2005-05-09 18:45:06]:** I'm putting this update at the top as it's the most ***important***. Forget all the crap below... you should just use [fink] to install `gaim-ssl`. Open a terminal and type:
fink install gaim-ssl
and you'll… more »
Oct
11
(disclaimer: this is not really a hack... just an obfuscated setting.)
So, one of the tiny things that has bugged me ever since I moved from Mozilla to Firefox is that using the tab key wouldn't let me completely navigate a web page with form data in… more »
Oct
11
For all the law students out there who would like to know how they, specifically, can help on Election Day:
This year, for the first time, there is also a nationwide nonpartisan election-monitoring program being run by a coalition of public interest gr… more »
Oct
11
Morgan is another great addition to the SIMS student body.
If you get a mobile phone in Malaysia, it'll come with Islamic applications. A popular mobile phone program tells you when to pray, and tells you which direction to point (optionally with the… more »
Oct
09
Kerry just passed Bush on the electoral vote predictor. Here's a neat view - a cartogram - of the country with the area of each state related to the number of electoral votes it has. It's a tad less depressing for a Kerry supporter like myself as the s… more »
Oct
09
Nathan Good just entered the blogosphere
Yes, I am responding to a blog for the first time ever. You should ask Peter about the term 'user'. We had a conversation about it a while back, where he mentioned that the term first came into use back when p… more »
Oct
09
I'm no genius, so I'll keep 'em short:
I watched the presidential debate last night. It was rather captivating. The dynamics of these kinds of encounters are fascinating. Kerry did pretty damn well... except his answer to the 'abortion is murder'… more »
Oct
09
Too freakin' wicked... Google is really pushing search into all aspects of our lives. Now you can text 'GOOGL' (46645) with specific queries and get short SMS answers.
Calculator Enter the calculation you'd like done as a query. The calculator ca… more »
Oct
07
A great piece of insight into how mucked up this administration is... from a DoD briefing that was mistakenly made "on the record" when it was supposed to not be.
Q Is this on the record?
STAFF: Yeah --
Q (Off m… more »
Oct
07
Judd is a bad-ass:
But I have come back around finally, after a period of being overwhelmed, to the reason I came to SIMS in the first place: a belief that the tools and perspectives of anthropology are useful and needed. In the face of all the new t… more »
Oct
05
GMail has the ability to save drafts... although they're going to need a "justification" feature like PINE's Ctrl-J which re-justifies a paragraph. more »
Oct
05
Ohio League of Women Voters Lawsuit
A coalition of citizen and labor groups filed suit this morning in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio (League of Women Voters of Ohio v. Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7622). The lawsuit challenges… more »
Oct
04
Brian at bIPlog says:
The US Forest Service operates a Mt. St. Helens VolcanoCam.
Their terms of use regarding the images are probably well-intentioned, but are an interesting example of a misunderstanding of both copyright law and the internet. more »
Oct
04
Here's a Search Bar for the USPTO Patent Database...
To install it, read the README file. Oh yeah, the patent above is a good one... 5,762,968. more »
Oct
04
Cheesebikini
SIMS graduate student Sean Savage provides great technology commentary - he coined the phrase "flash mob" - but seems to have abandoned his blog of late. more »
Oct
03
If you use FireFox, you can create search bars for almost any search form out there. I just created one for the California Election Code.
If you frequently find yourself searching the California Election Code, you might want to simply install… more »
Oct
02
Ping is a little harsh on himself about yesterday's event with Bill Gates. A few of us (Ping, myself, Arthur, Morgan, Yuri and few other students that I don't know very well) flyered the event (here is the front and back of the flyer).
Arthur has a… more »
Oct
02
Have I mentioned lately that I love my blog tool, b2evo? It's bad ass.
However, it is shipped by default to render smilies within the text of the post... and, in some cases, you'll want to be turning off smilies. For example, to say "C&D" b2ev… more »
Oct
02
Diebold 512(f) Smackdown...
elections, vendors, blogging, copyright, news, secrecy, chilling effectsThis is good news!
Background: I received a cease and desist from Diebold, Inc. last fall due to my having posted the email/memo archive at question in this case.
Aaron Swartz over at Copyfight points out that Stanford has a rule where if a stud… more »
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