Now that the dust has settled on the majority of the close elections nationwide, we can see more clearly than ever the most disturbing problem caused by using paperless touchscreen voting machines: the recounts were, to put it bluntly, a charade.
The goal of a recount is to ensure...

Ed Felten woke up this morning to a headline he couldn't to ignore: California Senator Wants to Throw Ed Felten in Jail.
You see, Felten is the primary author of Tiny P2P, a file-sharing program written in 15 lines of code. And the California senator...

Civil rights leader Lawrence Guyot, quoted over at Daily Kos: "I would call upon everyone who has access to 'Eyes on the Prize' to openly violate any and all laws regarding its showing."
The backstory is chronicled here; also apropos is Daniel Love's Powerful Pictures, the...

Not long ago, we were bemoaning the malign use Apple and Real Networks are making of digital rights management (DRM) -- in short, abusing legitimate customers in the service of marking territory. Unfortunately, that's far from the worst of it. As we point out in "Unintended Consequences: Five...

I've found two good analyses of the Skype voice over IP (VoIP) software: "An Analysis of the Skype Peer-to-Peer Internet Telephony Protocol," by Salman A. Baset and Henning Schulzrinne, and "VoIP and Skype Security," by Simson Garfinkel.

Skype is software that allows you to make phone calls...

Congressional Democrats yesterday forced a floor debate regarding the certification of Ohio's electoral votes. Citing widespread reports of voter suppression, e-voting machine breakdowns, and other examples of election day disenfranchisement, Senator Barbara Boxer of California and Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio objected to the certification of...

Princeton University professor Edward Felten today gazes into his crystal ball, providing 12 predictions for IT-related developments in 2005. Among them is the prediction that more people will begin to recognize the serious security and privacy risks inherent in digital rights management (DRM) technology. We're crossing our fingers...