TerrierTribe - Slashdot User

Maryland Scraps Diebold Voting System 209

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 21, 2008 @05:42PM from the long-overdue dept.

beadfulthings writes "After eight years and some $65 million, the state of Maryland is taking its first steps to return to an accountable, paper-ballot based voting system. Governor Martin O'Malley has announced an initial outlay of $6.5 million towards the $20 million cost of an optical system which will scan and tally the votes while the paper ballots are retained as a backup. The new (or old) system is expected to be in place by 2010 — or four years before the state finishes paying off the bill for the touch-screen system."

Submission + - FSF may sue Microsoft over GPLv3 (groklaw.net)

Submitted by

mjasay

on Tuesday August 28, 2007 @01:30PM

mjasay writes: "As Groklaw reports, the Free Software Foundation has issued a press release decrying Microsoft's attempts to distance itself from its obligations to abide by GPL Version 3. Citing Microsoft's earlier refusal to abide by GPLv3, the Free Software Foundation declared, "Microsoft cannot by any act of anticipatory repudiation divest itself of its obligation to respect others' copyrights." The press release goes on to imply that the Free Software Foundation may sue Microsoft over the issue."

Submission + - Microsoft's HD Photo to become JPEG Standard?

Submitted by Mortimer.CA on Thursday August 02, 2007 @12:23PM

Mortimer.CA writes: Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has submitted their HD Photo to the JPEG committee: 'Microsoft's ongoing attempt to establish its own photo format as a JPEG alternative (and potential successor) took another step forward today when the JPEG standards group agreed to consider HD Photo (originally named Windows Media Photo) as a standard. If successful, the new file standard will be known as JPEG XR.' Microsoft has made a 'commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge.' While JPEG 2000 exists, HD Photo has several advantages (not the least of which is a lot less CPU power is needed). Is this a big of an issue as ODF/OOXML?

Submission + - Identifying (and Fixing) Failing IT Projects

Submitted by

Esther Schindler

on Wednesday July 18, 2007 @11:20AM

Esther Schindler writes: "Often, the difference between success and failure is spotting critical early warning signs that a project is in trouble. CIO.com offers a few ways to identify the symptoms, as well as suggestions about what you can do to fix a project gone wrong.

One interesting point is that failure isn't preordained; IT projects are far more likely to succeed than they once were.

In 1994, the [Standish Group] researchers found that 31 percent of the IT projects were flat failures. That is, they were abandoned before completion and produced nothing useful. Only about 16 percent of all projects were completely successful: delivering applications on time, within budget and with all the originally specified features.

"As of 2006, the absolute failure rate is down to 19 percent," Johnson says. "The success rate is up to 35 percent." The remaining 46 percent are what the Standish Group calls "challenged": projects that didn't meet the criteria for total success but delivered a useful product.

And that's before the author enumerates the warning signs, both tangible and intangible."

Submission + - Unicode Encoding Implementation Flaw Widespread

Submitted by LordNikon on Monday May 21, 2007 @12:26PM

LordNikon writes: According to CERT "Full-width and half-width encoding is a technique for encoding Unicode characters. Various HTTP content scanning systems fail to properly scan full-width/half-width Unicode encoded HTTP traffic. By sending specially-crafted HTTP traffic to a vulnerable content scanning system, an attacker may be able to bypass that content scanning system.". Proof of concepts affecting IIS are already being posted to security mailing lists, and Cisco IPS and other IDS products are also affected.

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