:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 10.22.2003 ::
:: e-Voting update ::
From Wired News:
Students Fight E-Vote Firm
By Kim Zetter
A group of students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has launched an "electronic civil disobedience" campaign against voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems.
The students are protesting efforts by Diebold to prevent them and other website owners from linking to some 15,000 internal company memos that reveal the company was aware of security flaws in its e-voting software for years but sold the faulty systems to states anyway. The memos were leaked to voting activists and journalists by a hacker who broke into an insecure Diebold FTP server in March.
Diebold has been sending out cease-and-desist letters to force websites and ISPs to take down the memos, which the company says were stolen from its server in violation of copyright law. It has been using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, to force ISPs to take down sites hosting the memos or sites containing links to the memos.
Bev Harris, owner of the Black Box Voting site and author of a book on the electronic voting industry, was one of the first people to post the memos before a letter from Diebold threatened her with litigation.
Half a dozen other people hosting the memos in the United States, Canada, Italy and New Zealand also have received letters forcing them to take the material down.
Why War?, a nonprofit student organization at Swarthmore, and the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, also composed of Swarthmore students, announced plans to defy Diebold and their college ISP.
Why War? posted the memos on its website about two weeks ago but moved them to a student's computer after the college ISP received a cease-and-desist letter.
The college notified the student, who wishes to remain anonymous, that it would disconnect his Internet service if he didn't remove the memos. But Luke Smith, a sophomore, said students are planning to bypass that threat by hosting the memos on different machines. Each time one machine is shut down by Diebold, they will move the memos to another machine, passing them from student to student.
posted by me
:: 9:36:00 AM [+] ::
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