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Showing posts from October, 2006

How to steal an election by hacking the vote

This ArsTechnica article shows why Oregon's vote-by-mail system is the only way to assure that elections are not a fraudulent exercise (can any say, 'Ohio?'). Especially considering how Diebold has hidden problems in their system , please allow me to suggest, if you don't live in Oregon, that you vote absentee (as half of Seattle's voters now do). Our national election infrastructure is now largely an information technology infrastructure, so the problem of keeping our elections free of vote fraud is now an information security problem. If you've been keeping track of the news in the past few years, with its weekly litany of high-profile breeches in public- and private-sector networks, then you know how well we're (not) doing on the infosec front. Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica, I've followed the merging of the areas of election security and information security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly in the

Boom Boom

Here's a fascinatingly useful piece, which seems to confirm that Pyongang fizzled their alleged nuke test; a table correlating Richter scale seismograph reports to explosion sizes . With the magnitude 4.8 quate recorded , that suggests a 16 ton equivalent explosion. Fizzle, indeed.