Wow:
In Indiana’s Marion County, about 175 of 914 precincts turned to paper because poll workers didn’t know how to run the machines, said Marion County Clerk Doris Ann Sadler. Election officials in Delaware County, planned to seek a court order to extend voting after an apparent computer error prevented voters from casting ballots in 75 precincts.
Illinois officials were swamped with calls from voters complaining that poll workers did not know how to operate new electronic equipment
In Florida, voting was briefly delayed at four districts because of either mixed up ballots or electronic activators being unintentionally wiped out, according to Mary Cooney, spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections. Voters were forced to use paper ballots after an electronic machine broke in the Jacksonville suburb of Orange Park.
In suburban Pittsburgh, some precincts opened late because workers couldn’t zero out voting machines, raising concern that votes from previous elections had not been purged
In Passaic County, N.J., Republicans complained that a ballot had been pre-marked on some machines with a vote for the Democratic Senate candidate; the state attorney general was looking into the matter.
In Utah County, Utah, workers failed to properly encode some of the cards that voters use to bring up touchscreen ballots.
In Kentucky, a school board race was inadvertently left off the touchscreen ballot in two precincts in Bourbon County, requiring the county clerk to make paper ballots on the spot.
And the polls haven’t even closed yet. I thought e-voting was supposed to make elections less error-prone.
The BBC confirms that Microsoft’s Zune platform and its “Plays for Sure” platform will be incompatible:
Microsoft has said it will stop selling music from MSN music from 14 November, when Zune goes on sale in the US.
But in a move that could alienate some customers, MSN-bought tracks will not be compatible with the new gadget.
The move could also spell problems for the makers of MP3 players which are built to work with the MSN store.
The problem has arisen because tracks from the MSN Music site are compatible with the specifications of the Plays For Sure initiative.
This was intended to re-assure consumers as it guaranteed that music bought from services backing it would work with players that supported it. MSN Music, Napster, AOL Music Now and Urge all backed Plays For Sure as did many players from hardware makers such as Archos, Creative, Dell and Iriver.
In a statement a Microsoft spokesperson said: “Since Zune is a separate offering that is not part of the Plays For Sure ecosystem, Zune content is not supported on Plays For Sure devices.”
Amazing.
Ohio is having problems with e-voting again:
In one elementary school in the predominantly black district of East Cleveland, Ohio, all 12 machines went down when voting opened at 6:30 am (1130 GMT), according to an AFP correspondent at the scene.
The machines were not started up until two hours later and poll officials refused to hand out paper ballots until a lawyer for the watchdog group Election Protection showed up.
“The machines weren’t working and they were just turning people away,” said the attorney, Fred Livingstone. “They are not allowed to do that.”
More than 250 problems were reported at polling places in Ohio soon after polls opened according to an Election Protection watchdog operation run by a minority rights group and other non-governmental organizations.
I see two reasons for concern here. First is the obvious one: one of the basic requirements for voting machines is that they work. Every voting system has problems, but I’m not aware of any situations in which paper ballots refused to boot.
The more serious concern, though, is the possibility that this was the result of deliberate tampering. It’s conceivable (although highly unlikely) that someone programmed those machines to crash in order to reduce voting in precincts thought to be favorable to a particular candidate. I think it’s unlikely–but it’s not impossible. But if someone
were trying to steal an election, this is precisely the kind of tactic they might employ. It would look like an ordinary computer glitch, and people would probably think it was just a coincidence that it happened mostly in precincts that heavily favored a particular candidate.
Like I said, this was probably an innocent glitch, not a case of tampering. But it’s very worrisome that we will never know for certain.
This is a Red Hat marketing video, but I think it’s pretty cool:
http://www.youtube.com/v/FwYt7hobYZg
I’ve written about this in the past: in the long run, open systems tend to triumph over closed ones. I don’t think that Red Hat will necessarily be the open system that conquers the OS market. Personally, I’m rooting for the increasingly-open Mac OS X. But sooner or later, the inefficiencies of creating large software products using a centralized, Soviet development model will render that model unsustainable.
Glen Whitman wonders why karaoke manufacturers record their own versions of hit songs rather than taking the originals and stripping out the vocals. The result is a nice summary of the law of copyright as it applies to covers and compulsory licensing. Glen’s conclusion:
Here’s your choice as a karaoke producer: You can use your own musicians and sound technicians to recreate the work, and then pay a few cents per song (multiplied by the number of copies made). Or you can use the original track and strip out the vocals; but in order to do so, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, with all the transaction costs and probably higher price that would entail.
Is this system efficient? On the one hand, it’s clearly a waste of resources to hire musicians and sound technicians to reproduce works that already exist. In addition, the perceived quality will generally be lower than the original, since karaoke singers generally want something as close to the original as possible. On the other hand, extending the property rule to cover indirect duplication would create a hold-out problem: copyright owners could demand high prices for the right to create karaoke tracks. Real resources would be wasted on the negotiation process; worse, if negotiations ever broke down, some great songs might never get converted to karaoke form.
Continue reading →
A Wikipedia critic claims that plagiarism is rampant on the site:
Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.’s search engine. He removed matches in which another site appeared to be copying from Wikipedia, rather than the other way around, and examples in which material is in the public domain and was properly attributed. Brandt ended with a list of 142 articles, which he brought to Wikipedia’s attention. The site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, acknowledged that plagiarized passages do occasionally slip in but he dismissed Brandt’s findings as exaggerated.
It seems to me that there’s some ambiguity here between plagiarism and copyright infringement. Some of the articles were determined to be “OK because copied passages came from the public domain.” That’s a defense against
copyright infringement, but not against plagiarism. This confusion is intensified by the final paragraph of the article:
Editors found extensive problems in several cases, with many still not yet fully checked. Articles with offending passages have been stripped of most text. An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark’s entry, for instance, was deleted, leaving the article with the bare-bones: “Alonzo M. Clark (August 13, 1868-October 12, 1952) was an American politician who was Governor of Wyoming from 1931 to 1933.” The original article, Brandt said, was copied from a biography on the Wyoming state government site.
Aren’t government documents automatically placed in the public domain? If so, isn’t the remedy simply to include an attribution that the material came from the state of Wyoming’s website?
Techdirt is reporting that voting machines in California, manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems, allows you to cast multiple votes if the machines are placed in “manual mode.” Apparently the machines emit a “loud beep” when the “manual mode” button is pressed, but that hardly strikes me as an adequate safeguard, especially given that poll workers often receive limited training.
I’ve been beating up on Diebold lately, but the fundamental problem isn’t Diebold-specific. The problem is simply that e-voting is needlessly complex (and therefore error-prone) and inherently insecure. That will continue to be true no matter who’s manufacturing the machines.
Via Slashdot, Diebold is pissed off about HBO’s new documentary “Hacking Democracy.” They say it’s full of inaccuracies. For example:
The first of these material errors is the statement that Diebold tabulated more than 40 percent of the votes cast in the 2000 Presidential election. Diebold was not in the electronic voting business in 2000. Diebold purchased Global Election Systems in 2002, but Global had at the time only eight percent of the market.
Oh wait, it turns out that they haven’t actually seen the film. But they say the promotional materials on HBO’s website suggest the film contains these errors. Of course, they couldn’t be bothered to provide a URL or an in-context quote of the claims in question, so for all I know Diebold is wildly misrepresenting what it says on the website, which could be different from what the documentary says.
Continue reading →
I think one of the best pieces of evidence that patents are harmful to the software industry is the way that software companies’ behavior changes when they’re facing bankruptcy. A couple of weeks ago I discussed Transmeta’s transformation from an innovative technology company into a patent troll. Back in June, I covered Creative’s lawsuit against Apple after losing in the marketplace. This week we’ll consider SGI, another company with a proud history that has sadly descended into trolldom.
If a software patent were an ordinary productive asset like a plot of land or a truck, SGI’s behavior would make no sense. If somebody were squatting on SGI’s land, they would evict him immediately, they wouldn’t wait until they were facing bankruptcy before defending their property rights. Likewise, Disney or Merck wouldn’t tolerate another company using its movie copyrights or pharmaceutical patents without permission. Yet here we have SGI suddenly interested in suing over Patent #6,650,327, granted three years ago. Why didn’t SGI file this lawsuit back in 2003?
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Apparently UTube is suing YouTube for causing their website to have too much traffic. Jason Schulz is on the case:
Now I’m definitely sympathetic to Universal Tube’s plight. They’re a small business that mostly operates in an off-line world. This much traffic shutting down its servers is not something it asked for or deserves. But to respond by suing YouTube for it doesn’t make any sense. YouTube didn’t ask those people to go to the wrong website. In fact, YouTube wants nothing more than for all those people to find the right website. (Okay, maybe not the child pornographers, but everyone else).
Moreover, the fact that Universal Tube is suing primarily under trademark law and the old property doctrine of “trespass to chattels” is particularly disingenous. I mean, the company isn’t even called “utube”–it’s called Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment. They just picked the domain “utube” as a shorthand.
Trademark law is about companies in the same field using similar marks to confuse consumers not about blaming companies for the mistakes of Internet searchers who can’t find the right websites. No consumer looking for videos on the Internet is going to mistakenly buy used tubbing or visa-versa (unless of course, they’re looking for a series of tubes ;). What Universal Tube is trying to do here is right a wrong by squeezing a square peg in a round hole. There is no “trespass” here or trademark violation and they shouldn’t try to trick a court into finding one.
The only way this lawsuit makes sense is if it’s a negotiating tactic. After all, Mike says they’ve already turned down a million dollar offer for the domain–it surely doesn’t cost a small business a million dollars to change its web address. So they can’t honestly feel they’ve been injured. More likely, they’re expecting Google to buy them out, and they’re hoping a lawsuit will give them more leverage in the price negotiations.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.