Applied Miscellany

Today, Ari Feldman, Alex Halderman, and Ed Felten of Princeton University posted their security analysis of a Diebold AccuVote-TS electronic voting machine. This type of voting machine was used in several elections yesterday.
Electronic voting machines are basically repackaged personal computers that run election software. The researchers exploited significant flaws in the hardware, software, and […]

Here’s my weblog entry on some of the Thursday keynotes at OSCON 2006.
The Zen of Free
Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems
(Note that since giving his keynote, Mr. Phipps posted a weblog entry that includes a PDF of the text of his talk. What follows here is my spin on his talk.)
The keynote […]

OSCON 2006 Session Report
Title: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)
Speakers: Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman — Google, Inc.
The central theme of this talk is that attention and focus are the currency of an open source project and which must be protected. Poisonous people can erode both of these attributes. […]

Last week, I attended a part of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON 2006) in Portland, Oregon. The next few posts will be a recap of my notes for some of the sessions I attended.
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The CNNMoney.com article “e-Passports: Ready or not here they come” reports on the security and personal safety risks associated with the RFID (radio frequency identification) tags that will be embedded in U.S. passports by August 2006. These tags are meant to be read via radio waves from a “short” distance by a passport reader; […]

Ed Felten has posted a paper called Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality. It provides just enough technical details of the Internet to nicely cover the policy issues of network neutrality.
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I was quite pleased to see the Google has deployed a new beta release of Google Earth with support for Linux. After downloading it and beginning the install process I was stopped in my tracks by this clause in the license agreement:
4. AUTOMATIC UPDATES The Software may communicate with Google servers from time to […]

As reported by Slashdot, Google has announced the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which allows web developers to create AJAX applications in Java. The GWT then translates the Java code into client-side code. The client-side code is either Java bytecode (”hosted mode”) during development or JavaScript and HTML (”web mode”) for production deployment.
It […]

The Guaridan reports that with just a discarded British Airways boarding-pass stub that was found in a dustbin, the journalist and his computer expert was able to access personal details:
We logged on to the BA website, bought a ticket in [the passenger’s] name and then, using the frequent flyer number on his boarding pass stub, […]

Do you ever wish you could use the vi text editor to compose e-mail messages while using Thunderbird? If so, then read on:
For my day-to-day e-mail, I use Mutt as my e-mail client and Vim as my editor for composing messages. Most of the time, Mutt’s advantages outweigh its disadvantages (e.g., a plain […]