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This is a very important article published by Arstechnica. As a technologist I have always found the issue of electronic voting interesting, but I have also found that the way the US is rolling out electronic voting is alarming in it’s inconsistency and loack of technical oversight. Unfortunately there have been one too many political opinions clouding the real information that exists out there on the subject of evoting. This article really cuts through all of that:

What if I told you that it would take only one person—one highly motivated, but only moderately skilled bad apple, with either authorized or unauthorized access to the right company’s internal computer network—to steal a statewide election? You might think I was crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about something that’s only a remote, highly theoretical possibility. You also probably would think I was being really over-the-top if I told you that, without sweeping and very costly changes to the American electoral process, this scenario is almost certain to play out at some point in the future in some county or state in America, and that after it happens not only will we not have a clue as to what has taken place, but if we do get suspicious there will be no way to prove anything. You certainly wouldn’t want to believe me, and I don’t blame you.

So what if I told you that one highly motivated and moderately skilled bad apple could cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to America’s private sector by unleashing a Windows virus from the safety of his parents’ basement, and that many of the victims in the attack would never know that they’d been compromised? Before the rise of the Internet, this scenario also might’ve been considered alarmist folly by most, but now we know that it’s all too real.

Thanks to the recent and rapid adoption of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines in states and counties across America, the two scenarios that I just outlined have now become siblings (perhaps even fraternal twins) in the same large, unhappy family of information security (infosec) challenges. Our national election infrastructure is now largely an information technology infrastructure, so the problem of keeping our elections free of vote fraud is now an information security problem. If you’ve been keeping track of the news in the past few years, with its weekly litany of high-profile breeches in public- and private-sector networks, then you know how well we’re (not) doing on the infosec front.

Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica, I’ve followed the merging of the areas of election security and information security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. In all this time, I’ve yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it’s time to hit the panic button: In this article, I’m going to show you how to steal an election.

Now, I won’t be giving you the kind of “push this, pull here” instructions for cracking specific machines that you can find scattered all over the Internet, in alarmingly lengthy PDF reports that detail vulnerability after vulnerability and exploit after exploit. (See the bibliography at the end of this article for that kind of information.) And I certainly won’t be linking to any of the leaked Diebold source code, which is available in various corners of the online world. What I’ll show you instead is a road map to the brave new world of electronic election manipulation, with just enough nuts-and-bolts detail to help you understand why things work the way they do.

Along the way, I’ll also show you just how many different hands touch these electronic voting machines before and after a vote is cast, and I’ll lay out just how vulnerable a DRE-based elections system is to what e-voting researchers have dubbed “wholesale fraud,” i.e., the ability of an individual or a very small group to steal an entire election by making subtle changes in the right places.

So let’s get right down to business and meet the tools that we’re going to use to flip a race in favor of our preferred candidate.

Read the full article here

(CNN) — If presidential elections were held today, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would likely have a comfortable edge over Sen. John McCain, but take away her maiden name and McCain has a better shot of landing in the Oval Office.

So say the results of a CNN poll released Friday by Opinion Research Corp., which asked 506 adult Americans whom they preferred among potential 2008 presidential candidates. The margin of error for the survey is plus or minus 4.5 percent.

Asked if they preferred Hillary Rodham Clinton to McCain, respondents gave the Democratic New York senator and former first lady a 51 percent to 44 percent advantage over the Republican Senator from Arizona. Remove “Rodham” and McCain had a 1 percentage point advantage, 48 percent to 47 percent.

The results fall within the sample’s margin of error, so there is a “good chance, but not a statistical certainty” that Clinton’s maiden name would help her in a matchup against McCain, said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director.

The results are consistent with earlier testing that indicated Clinton’s favorability rose when her maiden name was included in the question, Holland said.

However, using “Rodham” seems to cut into Clinton’s edge if her opponent is former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Though Clinton has an advantage over Giuliani with or without her maiden name, using “Rodham” closes the gap. Asked if they prefer Hillary Clinton or Giuliani, Clinton has a 4 percentage point advantage, 50 percent to 46 percent.

Add “Rodham” to the equation and the former first lady’s advantage over the Republican former mayor drops to 1 percentage point, 48 percent to 47 percent.

Holland notes that the results are moot for two reasons: The election is still 2 years off and no poll will accurately predict a race that far in advance; and Clinton has always appeared on the ballot using her middle name, and there is no sign that she intends to abandon it in future elections.

While Muslim extremists have proven themselves to be very good at blowing themselves up, their lack of focus on education (other than the Koran) has proven them ineffective at hacking. Case in point:

Islamic computer hackers reportedly tried to disrupt the Vatican web site last week, but failed.

In an online forum for militant Muslims, a previously unknown group had announced plans for an assault on the Vatican computer network, which was said to be a form of retribution for Pope Benedict’s recent speech which was seen by many Muslims as an attack on Islam.

Police later confirmed that there had been a concerted effort by hackers to penetrate the Vatican site, but computer-security experts were able to detect and repel the attack.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Borat, the fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan, may have gotten under the skin of Kazakh officials but on Thursday he couldn’t get past the gates of the White House.

Secret Service agents turned away British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the boorish, anti-Semitic journalist, when he tried to invite “Premier George Walter Bush” to a screening of his upcoming movie, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”

Also invited to the screening:
O.J. Simpson, “Mel Gibsons” and other “American dignitaries.”

Cohen’s stunt was timed to coincide with an official visit by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who is scheduled to meet with Bush on Friday.

Nazarbayev and other Kazakh officials have sought to raise the profile of the oil-rich former Soviet republic and assure the West that, contrary to Borat’s claims, theirs is not a nation of drunken anti-Semites who treat their women worse than their donkeys.

Kazakhstan is expected to become one of the top 10 oil producers within a decade. A U.S. ally with troops in
Iraq, the country has drawn criticism for its deteriorating civil liberties and flawed elections.

Shortly after Nazarbayev dedicated a statue in front of the Kazakh embassy, Borat denounced an official Kazakh publicity campaign running in U.S. magazines as “disgusting fabrications” orchestrated by neighboring Uzbekistan.

“If there is one more item of Uzbek propaganda claiming that we do not drink fermented horse urine, give death penalty for baking bagels, or export over 300 tonnes of human pubis per year, then we will be left with no alternative but to commence bombardment of their cities with our catapults,” Borat said.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has famously called high schools “obsolete” and warned about their effect on U.S. competitiveness. Now, his company has a chance to prove that it can help fix the woes of public education.

After three years of planning, the Microsoft Corp.-designed “School of the Future” opened its doors Thursday, a gleaming white modern facility looking out of place amid rows of ramshackle homes in a working-class West Philadelphia neighborhood.

The school is being touted as unlike any in the world, with not only a high-tech building — students have digital lockers and teachers use interactive “smart boards” — but also a learning process modeled on Microsoft’s management techniques.

“Philadelphia came to us … and asked us to design a school,” said Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft. “We’re going to take our best shot.”

The company didn’t pay the $63 million cost — that was borne by the Philadelphia School District — but shared its personnel and management skills. About 170 teens, nearly all black and mainly low-income, were chosen by lottery to make up the freshman class. The school eventually plans to enroll up to 750 students.

Read the full CNN story here

Taxpayers may soon be able to track how the federal government is spending their money with the click of computer mouse.

A far-flung coalition of groups across the political spectrum supports the idea and their efforts were rewarded Thursday as the Senate passed a bill to build a Google-like search engine to allow people to track online approximately $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks and loans.

The idea is to open up the federal budget to greater scrutiny and hopefully prevent wasteful spending. Conservatives vow greater scrutiny of”pork barrel”spending while liberals hope to foster a greater appreciation of the good things that the government does.

The bill, sponsored by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., passed after Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, dropped his objections. Senate leaders had tried to pass the bill in early August but Stevens and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., blocked passage by lodging secret”holds”on the bill.

But after a remarkable campaign by Internet bloggers to track down those responsible for the delay, Stevens and Byrd let the measure advance.

“Every American has the right to know how their government spends their money, and then to hold elected officials accountable for those decisions,”Coburn said.”Only by fostering a culture of openness, transparency and accountability will Congress come together to address the mounting fiscal challenges that threaten our future prosperity.”

Read the rest here

Google Inc., which refused in the past year to hand over user search data to U.S. authorities fighting children’s access to pornography, said yesterday that it was complying with a Brazilian court’s orders to turn over data that could help identify users accused of taking part in online communities that encourage racism, pedophilia and homophobia.

The difference, it says, is scale and purpose.

The Justice Department wanted Google’s entire search index, billions of pages and two months’ worth of queries, for a broad civil case. Brazil, by contrast, is looking for information in specific cases involving Google’s social networking site, Orkut.

“What they’re asking for is not billions of pages,” said Nicole Wong, Google associate general counsel. “In most cases, it’s relatively discrete — small and narrow.”

Google released a statement yesterday saying it was complying with the Brazilian court orders following a ruling Thursday by a Brazilian judge that threatened Google with a fine of $23,000 a day for noncompliance.

Read the full Washington Post article here

A senior editor at The New Republic was suspended and his blog was shut down on Friday after revelations that he was involved in anonymously attacking readers who criticized his posts.

Lee Siegel, creator of the Lee Siegel on Culture blog for tnr.com, was suspended indefinitely from the magazine after a reader accused him of using a “sock puppet,” or Internet alias, to attack his critics in the comments section of his blog. An editor’s apology replaced the blog on the Web site, announcing that the blog would no longer be published and noting that The New Republic deeply regretted “misleading” its readers.

Franklin Foer, the New Republic’s editor, said in an interview that he first became aware of the accusations against Mr. Siegel on Thursday afternoon, after a colleague noticed a comment in the Talkback section of Mr. Siegel’s blog that accused him of using the alias “sprezzatura” to defend his articles and assail his critics.

That comment, posted by a reader named “jhschwartz” on Aug. 27, said that “sprezzatura appears only to weigh in on TNR forums to admonish and taunt posters who dislike Lee Siegel” before concluding, “I would say with 99% confidence that ‘sprezzatura’ is a Siegel alias.”

“We launched an investigation,” Mr. Foer said. He added that he was confident that sprezzatura’s posts were written with Mr. Siegel’s “full cooperation,” but declined to say whether the alias was used by Mr. Siegel himself because the affair was still under investigation. “As soon as the facts of the case became clear to me on Friday, we closed down the blog and made an announcement.” Mr. Foer said that while he liked to see blog posts before they were published, Mr. Siegel did not have an editor assigned to his blog entries.

In a statement by e-mail, Mr. Siegel said, “I’m sorry about my prank, which was certainly not designed to harm a magazine that has been my happy intellectual home for many years.”

Read the entire NY Times article here

Politics-Time is just around the corner, as the Dem’s battle to take back the House & Senate. But here is one interesting take on who is voting for who based on income:
From the Washington Times:

“$23,700. That is the household income level at which a white person became more likely to vote for a Republican over a Democrat in congressional races in 2004,” Anne Kim, Adam Solomon and Jim Kessler write in the Democratic Strategist (www.thedemocraticstrategist.org).
“That’s $5,000 above the poverty line for a family of four, less than half the median income of the typical voting household of all races, and an emphatic repudiation of all things Democratic among the white middle class. Obtaining a sustainable Democratic majority in either house will be impossible unless there is a significant change in this economic tipping point,” the writers said.
“To solve this problem, Democrats must first realize that they have a problem — no, actually a crisis — with the middle class. Democrats — the self-described party of the middle class — have not won the middle-class vote in at least a decade. Among all voters with $30,000 to $75,000 in household income, Bush bested Kerry by 6 points and congressional Republicans won by 4 points. …
“The second step is to admit that our deficit is as much due to economic disconnects as cultural and national security disconnects. That may be harder for Democrats to swallow. Many believe the middle class have been duped by a what’s-the-matter-with-Kansas scheme in which clever conservatives trick the beleaguered middle class to vote against their own economic interests through the use of irresistible cultural wedge issues and national security concerns.”

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - Tax breaks benefiting buyers of sports-utility vehicles fly in the face of a good energy policy and are costing American taxpayers billions of dollars a year, according to a report from Rep. Edward Markey.

“It is incredible that the Bush Administration and Republican Congress can be so blind as to leave these tax loopholes in place while our dependence on Middle East oil soars, the price of gasoline spikes, and our soldiers are mired a war in the Middle East,” said Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts.

The study, which includes estimates from the Joint Tax Committee of Congress and focuses on two policies favoring the purchase heavier vehicles over smaller models, showed that the tax breaks will cost $2.6 billion next year and $15.7 billion over the next 10 years.

The first break is the exemption light trucks and minivans get from the Gas Guzzler Tax, a levy imposed on autos rated below 22.5 miles per gallon. As an example, the report said an Audi station wagon that gets 20.5 mpg incurs a $1,300 tax, while a 15.8 mpg Jeep incurs no penalty.
Markey also criticized a policy that allows businesses to purchase SUVs and write off most or all of the cost of the vehicle on their income taxes in the first year. That amounts to a subsidy of almost $600 million a year, and $4.1 billion over the next 10 years, he said.

“This makes no sense. Congress is using the tax code to generate artificial demand for inefficient vehicles in the automobile marketplace,” said Markey, who introduced a bill aimed at eliminating both tax breaks for SUVs.

“Regardless of whether we ever ramp up and modernize the minimum fuel economy standards, providing these out-of-date tax incentives that reward the purchase of inefficient vehicles just make things worse,” he added.

Meanwhile, demand for the so-called gas guzzlers has fallen off steadily in recent years, a blow to domestic automakers that depend heavily on the full-size vehicles for profits. Truck sales at General Motors (GM :
General Motors Corporation plunged 31.2% in July, while Ford’s fell 43.8%.