inc_totals_at_rate(1000);

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Computer Scientist Takes E-Voting Apart

Computer Scientist Takes E-Voting ApartA Princeton computer scientist said Uncle Sam taught him how easy it can be to hack on the cheap.

Professor and electronic-voting critic Andrew Appel spent only $82 to buy five $5,000 Sequoia electronic voting machines from a government auction Web site last month according to Wired News. It didn’t take long, he said, for he and his students to find security holes in the AVC Advantage machines — one student picked the lock in only 7 seconds, gaining access to the machine’s motherboard and memory chip.

A Sequoia spokeswoman said Mr. Appel exaggerated the machines’ vulnerability and that they were designed to alert headquarters if manipulated. But Mr. Appel suggested that would-be manipulators were capable of anticipating and disabling alarms. —Sierra Millman

COULD THIS MOUNTAIN LOCATOR BEACON HAVE SAVED THE THREE OREGON CLIMBERS?
Would
the missing climbers have benefitted from carrying a personal locator
beacon, like this $700 Terrafix unit, as some have suggested?
Tracing a Climbers Footprints in Cyberspace – The Lede

W pushes envelope on U.S. spying BY JAMES GORDON MEEK DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAUWASHINGTON – President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant, the Daily News has learned. The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open people’s mail under emergency conditions. That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it. Bush’s move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise. “Despite the President’s statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people’s mail without a warrant,” said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill. Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail. “The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington. “The danger is they’re reading Americans’ mail,” she said. “You have to be concerned,” agreed a career senior U.S. official who reviewed the legal underpinnings of Bush’s claim. “It takes Executive Branch authority beyond anything we’ve ever known.” A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised, “It’s something we’re going to look into.” Most of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act deals with mundane reform measures. But it also explicitly reinforced protections of first-class mail from searches without a court’s approval. Yet in his statement Bush said he will “construe” an exception, “which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection in a manner consistent … with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances.” Bush cited as examples the need to “protect human life and safety against hazardous materials and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.” White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore denied Bush was claiming any new authority. “In certain circumstances – such as with the proverbial ‘ticking bomb’ – the Constitution does not require warrants for reasonable searches,” she said. Bush, however, cited “exigent circumstances” which could refer to an imminent danger or a longstanding state of emergency. Critics point out the administration could quickly get a warrant from a criminal court or a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge to search targeted mail, and the Postal Service could block delivery in the meantime. But the Bush White House appears to be taking no chances on a judge saying no while a terror attack is looming, national security experts agreed. Martin said that Bush is “using the same legal reasoning to justify warrantless opening of domestic mail” as he did with warrantless eavesdropping.

NY DAILY NEWS

Crooks and Liars

“The NY times is carrying an article about how the RIAA is hiring hip
hop artists to make mix tapes, and then helping the police raid their
studios. In the case of DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon, they were raided by
SWAT teams with their guns drawn. The local police chief said later
that they were ‘prepared for the worst.’ Men in RIAA jackets helped
cart away ‘evidence’. Just the same, ‘Record labels regularly hire
mixtape D.J.’s to produce CDs featuring a specific artist. In many
cases, these arrangements are conducted with a wink and a nod rather
than with a contract; the label doesn’t officially grant the D.J. the
right to distribute the artist’s songs or formally allow the artist to
record work outside of his contract.’ “

Slashdot:

Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army’s Top Medical Facility

By Dana Priest and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 18, 2007; A01

Behind
the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn
and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded
combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the
bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building,
constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out.
Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches,
stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building
18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was
evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq
last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead
from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the
hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed
hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Brit Hume

By:
John Amato

 Brit
Hume couldn’t control himself this morning on FOX and was frothing
at the mouth in his attacks on Murtha over Iraq. It was not much
different than what you might read on a Freeper website. Murtha
has endured a barrage of personal attacks since he spoke out against
the war, (which seems like a decade ago.) but Hume really made a
jackass out of himself by questioned his state of mind.

Download (5404) | Play (2854) Download (1412) | Play (1559)

HUME: That sound bite from John Murtha suggests that
it’s time a few things be said about him. Even the
“Washington Post” noted he didn’t seem particularly
well informed about what’s going on over there, to say the least.
Look, this man has tremendous cache among House Democrats, but he is
not — this guy is long past the day when he had anything but the
foggiest awareness of what the heck is going on in the world.

And that sound bite is naivete at large, and the man is an absolute
fountain of such talk, and the fact that he has ascended to the
position he has in the eyes of the Democrats in the House and perhaps
Democrats around the country tells you a lot about how much they know
or care about what’s really going on over there. (h/t TP for the transcript)

Does he mean THE Washington Post that’s trying to get Libby off?

Crooks and Liars

On behalf of the WordPress.org community of commiters, contributers, and volunteers, I’m very proud to announce the immediate availability of WordPress 2.1 “Ella”, named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. Here’s a sampling of what’s in the new version:

* Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
* Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
* The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
* Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
* New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
* You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
* Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
* Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
* Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
* More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
* Pages can now be drafts, or private.
* Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
* The dashboard now loads instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
* Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
* Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
* The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
* A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

…and much, much more. There are little easter eggs hidden everywhere, so the best way to find everything new is to just try it out.
Developer Features

Developers will especially love this release, as it has much cleaner code than 2.0 and includes hundreds of enhancements that will enable a new generation of richer plugins. Here’s a taste of some of the things included:

* Psuedo-cron functionality let’s you schedule events much like cron.
* Users admin can now comfortably handle hundreds of thousands of users.
* The new WP_Error class cleans up how we do error reporting and handling.
* The javascript loader makes it easier for plugins to include rich functionality.
* Tons of new hooks and APIs.
* We’ve started to fill out our code inline documentation.
* Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins.
* Custom header, color picker, and image cropping framework.

2.1 also includes over 550 bug fixes.
The Future

What’s really exciting for me is what’s coming in the future. First of all, the 2.0 series was an unparalleled success, with over 1.8 million downloads, and thanks to the work of Mark Jaquith we’re committing to maintaining stable security and bug fixes on the 2.0 branch until 2010.

More exciting for most of our users, though, is our new development cycle. Based on everything we’ve learned in the past 3 years of doing WordPress, we’ve decided to shift to a more frequent release schedule like Ubuntu, with major releases coming several times a year. So, for the first time in WordPress’ history, I have an answer to when the next version is coming out: April 23rd.

Even better, the development will be driven primarily by the features you guys are voting for on the ideas board. (But wait, there’s more: the ideas board now has a new Hot-or-Not-like interface for rating a bunch of ideas at once, so go get your vote on and have a say in WordPress 2.2.)

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