OK, this will be the last voting machine post for the week, but I couldn’t help plugging Avi Rubin’s new blog, which was pointed out to me by Mike Masnick. In particular, Rubin has a chilling account of his experiences as an election judge. He describes how two of the machines didn’t have the right security tags, and so they were set aside. However, later in the day, facing high turnout, they got a call from the elections board telling them to put those machines back into service. And there’s more:
Throughout the early part of the day, there was a Diebold representative at our precinct. When I was setting up the poll books, he came over to “help”, and I ended up explaining to him why I had to hook the ethernet cables into a hub instead of directly into all the machines (not to mention the fact that there were not enough ports on the machines to do it that way). The next few times we had problems, the judges would call him over, and then he called me over to help. After a while, I asked him how long he had been working for Diebold because he didn’t seem to know anything about the equipment, and he said, “one day.” I said, “You mean they hired you yesterday?” And he replied, “yes, I had 6 hours of training yesterday. It was 80 people and 2 instructors, and none of us really knew what was going on.” I asked him how this was possible, and he replied, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s all money. They are too cheap to do this right. They should have a real tech person in each precinct, but that costs too much, so they go out and hire a bunch of contractors the day before the election, and they think that they can train us, but it’s too compressed.” Around 4 pm, he came and told me that he wasn’t doing any good there, and that he was too frustrated, and that he was going home. We didn’t see him again.
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The New York Times today has an excellent article on the incredible shrinking audience for broadcast radio. Increasingly, the Times points out, Americans are tuning out their AM and FM stations and going elsewhere for music and news–to satellite radio, the Internet, their iPods and more.
More than 9 of 10 Americans do still listen to broadcast radio each week, but they are listening less. Americans aged 12-24 in fact listen to broadcast radio as startling 15 percent less than they did only seven years ago. “We’ve lost the hipness battle,” one executive is quoted as saying, along with a fair amount of stock value. The major radio firms are fighting back in a number of ways–but many are also selling stations.
The trend has obvious implications for the FCC–which has just launched an inquiry into, among other things, its radio ownership limits. For some time, the radio ownership debate has been focused on the dominant position of Clear Channel Communications, which is routinely trotted out as example number one of a Media Monopolist (oddly, since it holds only some 10 percent of licenses nationally). But dominance in broadcast radio today isn’t what is used to be. After all, what’s the point of being a monopolist when there’s so much competition? It simply may not matter how many AM or FM stations someone owns when their customers can so easily listen elsewhere.
Luis Villa urges Red Hat to join the voting machine industry. He suggests that the open source model would be a good fit for voting machine development:
Security- As Ed Felten demonstrated spectacularly yesterday, the current generation of electronic voting machines are painfully insecure. Go watch the video. Open souce security auditing can do much better than that. (Diebold’s defense, by the way, is that Felten should have asked them for more information. That would not be a problem in an open source context.)
Cost- Governments are fairly price sensitive, especially in low-profile areas like voting. Open source is traditionally very cost competitive, and in this particular case, the closed-source systems have to license components like WinCE, so they are definitely at a disadvantage.
Pre-existing community- Corporate-sponsored open source work does best when it works in hand with existing bodies of volunteers and expertise. Such groups already exist in open source voting; open voting consortium is the first hit on google but I believe there are others as well.
Political motivation: one of the most tried and true ways to motivate open source contributors is to give them a bad guy. Voting fraud is replete with bad guys on all sides; if a project got enough backing (i.e., RH) to make it look like it might get actually used in an actual election, people would come out of the woodwork to audit and patch it.
And he points out that Red Hat is one of the few open source companies with a track record of building complex, mission-critical hardware-software systems.
I find this argument pretty compelling. I still think the best solution would be not to use computerized voting machines at all, but if we must have them, it’s hard to beat open source for security, transparency, and affordability.
On Wednesday, I was in New York City attending another installment of the Internet Content Rating Association’s (ICRA) outstanding ongoing series of summits on child protection & freedom of expression in a our new information age. As with previous ICRA events in Washington, Sunnyvale, CA, and Brussels, the focus of the New York roundtable discussion was: What steps can we take to shield children from potentially objectionable Internet or media content without repressing freedom of speech / expression? In particular, the role of private, self-regulation (labeling, rating, filtering, educating, etc) was discussed and debated in detail.
In addition to being the focus of much of my ongoing research at PFF, you might also recall that I wrote about a major summit on similar issues that took part in this June in Washington, D.C., which featured Senator Hillary Clinton among other distinguished speakers. And the Congressional Internet Caucus has an upcoming series of Capitol Hill panel discussions on these issues and just released a compilation of short white papers summarizing what various groups are doing about online child safety issues. So this continues to be a hot topic.
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Diebold has released a response to the Felten study. It appears to me to be misleading in several important respects, so I thought it merited a quick fisking:
Three people from the Center for Information Technology Policy and Department of Computer Science at Princeton University today released a study of a Diebold Election Systems AccuVote-TS unit they received from an undisclosed source. The unit has security software that was two generations old, and to our knowledge, is not used anywhere in the country.
As I noted yesterday, this response would be a lot more credible if Diebold had a habit of submitting its machines to independent review. It’s hardly Felten’s fault that he had trouble getting access to a newer version of the machine.
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Are you good at geography? If so, you may enjoy the small geography quiz buried deep inside of the telecommunications bill now pending in the U.S. Senate. Hidden on page 121 is a paragraph directing the FCC to expand universal service payments to “insular areas, including any insular area that is a State comprised entirely of islands…”
Can you name all the states that are comprised entirely of islands? No, Rhode Island isn’t one of them. As it turns out, the list of states covered by this provision is quite short:
1. Hawaii.
And, by total coincidence, a senator from that state–Daniel Inouye–is the co-chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee–which wrote the bill.
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Via TechDirt comes news that a California DJ confirms that he, too, has been “hacking” the gov’s site. As Joe says, the real scandal is why the governor’s office hired such incompetent administrators. What other confidential government documents are they making available to the world?
A few weeks ago, the FCC courageously requested public comment on the merits of using auctions to determine who gets Universal Service support to provide subsidized phone service in rural areas. One difficulty with a reverse auction is what, if anything, to do about stranded investment. What are the legitimate investment expectations that the incumbent provider deserves to recover?
Under the current system, the incumbent rural phone companies will be subsidized in perpetuity. Yet, cable VoIP service and wireless systems have been built in many rural areas without Universal Service support. Many of the competitors are now seeking their fair share. Chairman Kevin Martin noted Tuesday at a Senate hearing that these competitors received $1 million when he came to the commission but get $1 billion now.
Martin stood up for reforming Universal Service so it supports the best and most efficient new technologies, and he took a beating from Senate Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK)–an ally of the incumbent rural phone companies–who, like most politicians, focused on who would be the winners and losers:
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Diebold is not happy with Prof. Felten’s paper:
The marketing director for the machine’s maker – Diebold Inc.’s Diebold Election Systems of Allen, Texas – blasted the report, saying Felten ignored newer software and security measures that prevent such hacking.
“I’m concerned by the fact we weren’t contacted to educate these people on where our current technology stands,” Mark Radke said.
This is pretty rich coming from a company that fiercely resists independent inspections of their machines. I rather doubt Prof. Felten deliberately chose an old version of Diebold’s software to make them look bad. In fact, I would be shocked if Diebold were willing to lend Prof. Felten a newer version of their voting machine so he could verify their claims that the security problems have been fixed.
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Assistant Attorney General Thomas O. Barnett gave a rather odd history of the iTunes Store at a speech at George Mason University yesterday:
Apple’s iTunes music service has (for the moment) solved a problem that some observers, less than five years ago, predicted might never be solved: how to create a consumer-friendly, yet legal and profitable, system for downloading music and other entertainment from the Internet. It is instructive to review the history of the problem. The technical capability to offer digital music over the Internet has existed at least since the early 1990s; nevertheless, digital music first moved online in a significant way only in 1999 with the launch of the Napster centralized file-sharing service. There were major flaws with the early attempts to offer downloadable music: Napster and Grokster were based principally on piracy, while recording industry efforts such as MusicNet and pressplay never achieved wide use and, in addition, were attacked as risking a recording industry monopoly over not just the songs, but technological development as well. While it battled the music pirates, the music industry suffered huge losses, including a 25 percent drop in sales from 2001 to 2002, which could be measured in the billions of dollars. Reviewing that bleak picture, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America said in 2002, “I wish I could tell you that there is a silver bullet that could resolve this very serious problem. There is not.”
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