Maybe sweeps are in November because that is when the elections are? Anyway the problem with electronic voting is not only that it is hard to do right, but also that it is impossible to show the average voter that it has been done right. With paper ballots and each party having a representative at the polling place and at the counting, voters are willing to believe the count is accurate. The offer to examine the source code is less convincing. Saying that the source code has been examined by someone paid for by the company that wrote the code is nothing at all.

The good news is that the Marvel chip won't support Windows.

The bad news is that the child with an OLPC while she may learn to do art on her computer, won't learn to do anything helpful in any labor market on earth. With a tablet, she won't even learn to touch type. I know that the project wants to prepare her for more self-actualizing career, such as poet, designer, president or CIO, very few will have that opportunity if they can't get an entry level job in the urban sector.

You can use the ITA engine at http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch and it is really quite good compared to most airline/agency websites. However, it won't actually sell you a ticket.

I have been amazed over the last few years that both the general public and security professionals think that email addresses and social security numbers can be made confidential, like passwords. Surely that is impossible to achieve. If spam is to be stopped, it will certainly be another way. If identity theft is to be stopped, it is certain to be another way.

I am not sure where the idea that PXE boot files are limited to 32KB comes from, but we are booting FreeBSD 8.0 with a 240KB boot file with PXE and tftp and have not had to do anything special. We also boot Linux (Fedora 11) with a 4MB initrd over tftp and that has not posed any difficulties either. Our FreeBSD experience is documented at http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/FreeBSD-diskless.html - it works quite well for us. I looked at gPXE and it doesn't really solve any problems we have had. Actually, we have had only one problem - sometimes the OS boot code doesn't support the motherboard ethernet, and we have to add a different ethernet card for post-boot LAN access.

Yes, in fact there is no evidence that any password has ever been brute-forced, except in a demonstration. (Dictionary attack is not brute-force).

Interestingly, we had support contracts for several SPARC machines until recently, but when the time
for renewal came around SUN didn't send any notice, and we let it go. I think of this as
"passive/aggressive" behavior on their part and seems typical of our experience with the administrative
side of SUN, although past adventures (such as wrong addresses on shipments) have been worse. .

The patent makes no sense, because it includes no description of a mechanism for achieving the stated objective. You should be able to get a patent on a particular method of doing something, but since when can you patent all possible methods of doing something? Especially when there aren't any. We have been doing this at work for over a decade, using IP address information from whois servers. It isn't very accurate, but it works well enough for us.

Daniel Feenberg

I have worked with anonymized government data extensively, and birthdate and zipcode are always considered personally identifiable information. Sometimes birth year is available, and sometimes state or (rarely) county is available, but I have never even heard of a dataset with both. Datasets with month and day of birth are never considered to be anonymized, and are not released. The author of the paper is much overwrought.

There is no need to physically destroy a drive to prevent data from being read. The claims of Gutmann that it was possible to read overwritten sectors were never sustained by his sources. I investigated this years ago and reported in Can Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data that he was very much overwrought. I see he has gone on to tilt at other windmills since he propagated that myth.

OK, suppose the tamper-evident seal is found to be broken at the end of the election day. What happens then? Are those votes not counted? I wouldn't expect that result. That would open a door to an intruder going to a district favoring the opponent and merely tampering with the seal. I'd expect the votes to be counted in spite of the broken seal. Is there actual experience anywhere on this point?

The next time Verion needs a favor from the sheriff they will regret their decision. They need the favors from the police a lot more often than vice versa, for example, protecting copper lines from theft.

If you work for an hour and earn $25, then give it to charity, you have no net increase in taxable income, since the additional income is offset by the additional deduction. Thus, you can work and give to charity the full value of your work, without losing any to income taxes.

If you volunteer an hour of labor directly to the charity, there is no tax paid either. Both situations - working in the market to support a charity and working directly in the charity are treated the same by the tax law.

I will stipulate that most readers of this will not understand it, but if you do, please consider graduate school in economics.