Catching up on my reading, I recently came across this post from the University of Chicago’s Saul Levmore about the merits of touchscreen voting. Levmore thinks that "the future is surely with the touch-screen or some other form of online voting." Levmore doesn’t go into any detail about why he thinks this; I assume he’s simply not familiar with the many e-voting problems we’ve covered here at Techdirt. He may not know, for example, that voting machines are susceptible to viruses that can allow a single person to corrupt every machine in a county or even an entire state. Levmore makes an interesting analogy to automatic teller machines. He points out that we’ve been using ATMs without any serious problems for decades, and wonders why we can’t use the same technologies for voting machines.
What Levmore is missing is that the security model of an ATM is totally different from the security model of a voting machine. The most import...
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Central Planning Didn’t Work In Russia And It Doesn’t Work On Your Set-Top BoxFrom: techscoop.net
Post Date: 2008-03-07 19:24:00
Here’s a roundup of movie-download services -- Apple TV, Vudu, Movielink, Unbox -- all of which have unperformed expectations. This won’t come as a surprise to Techdirt readers, as we’ve panned these products before . And the reasons they’ve flopped are frankly pretty obvious: high prices, restrictive DRM, and no easy way to move videos to the device of your choice. I won’t re-hash those arguments, but I think it’s interesting to compare the anemic d...
more Phorm Goes On The Offensive To Defend Its Ad Program On Privacy QuestionsFrom: techscoop.net
Post Date: 2008-03-07 17:43:13
Last month, we wrote about the plan by a variety of UK-based ISPs to use all of your clickstream data to target ads to you as you surfed. That is, if you were surfing a golf site and then went and checked CNN, the system would still know that you liked golf and might serve up golf ads on CNN. At least that’s the benign version of it. There are some serious questions raised by this. First of all, many people are likely to be uncomfortable with the idea that their ISP is watching what ...
more Transparency Isn’t A Substitute For PrivacyFrom: techscoop.net
Post Date: 2008-03-07 16:22:00
Slashdot points to a great Bruce Schneier article debunking the idea that "transparency" is better than privacy. People like David Brin argue that technological change is rapidly making the concept of privacy obsolete, and that instead of lamenting this fact, we should make sure that everyone , including the government, is subject to increased "transparency." But Schneier does a great job of explaining what’s wrong with this theory: the less power you have, the more important your ...
more What Good Does It Do To Shut Down Trade Show Booths Over Patent Claims?From: techscoop.net
Post Date: 2008-03-07 15:01:00
A somewhat bizarre situation happened in Germany earlier this week, where various demonstrators at the popular CeBit trade show had their booths raided by German police , confiscating various gadgets for infringing on patents. Patent law is a bit different in Germany, allowing this type of seizure, but I can’t understand what sort of practical reason there could be for allowing such a thing. No one was directly selling these products, just demonstrating them. Second, confiscating the p...
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