Internet

Election Voting on the web has serious flaws according to US security experts.

Click here for the pdf:Security Analysis of SERVE

Their executive summary states:

This report is a review and critique of computer and communication security issues in the SERVE voting system (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment), an Internet-based voting system being built for the U.S. Department of Defense's FVAP (Federal Voting Assistance Program). 

Penner recently joined the s9y team.  Can't wait to see the new user administration functions. As it is, we've been adding users to by way of myadmin -just get the hash right and it works fine. That isn't for everybody, though.

It would be REALLY cool if the team would thrash the table structure to allow multiple blogs to exist in the same database, without creating more tables hmmm waitasec - mebbe you don't have to... brb

Howard Dean's recent calamity in the Iowa was the result of mis-reading and mismanaging web demographics.

Gene Koprowski writes for UPI:

CHICAGO, Jan. 21 (UPI) -- Howard Dean won a virtual primary online last summer, but the maverick politician did not fare so well in Monday's real-world Iowa caucuses.

Pundits and online technology consultants say that was because the demographics of the Internet are quite different than those of the electorate at large: younger, more affluent, more liberal and more motivated by new technology.

Thus, certain kinds of candidates perform exceptionally well online, while others simply do not.

"The kinds of candidates who do well online are a Bill Bradley, a Howard Dean, or a John McCain," Michael Lux, a former Clinton White House domestic policy aide, now a political consultant in Washington D.C., told United Press International. "They draw a constituency that is not blow-dried, that is not totally mainstream. The whole Internet culture is drawn to them."

This may create some false expectations for a candidate and his minions and even the media, because an Internet community can be spread out across the whole country, but voting is still carried out locally, and candidates often are chosen based on local values. (see the [hopefully permanent ]article at http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040120-092014-8691r)

Besides the internal mis-reading and mis-managing of web-o-philes, traditional media outlets also overlooked the data.

Is Pagerank dead? The Google PageRank's attempt to deal with digital density is admirable but flawed. The database claims 3,307,998,701, and the deep web isn't indexed. I estimate there are at least 1/3 to 50% more pages that exist that aren't indexed. The density will only increase, further eroding Pagerank's value as a concept. In the end volume conquers all.

Mr. Battelle, get a little deeper. The suit between Playboy and Netscape is far from a nuisance. It illustrates a continuation of some of the twisted business model values that plagued and then caused the dot-com crash.

Battelle writes "The question here is of balance. Where and how do you draw the line as to what is a misuse of a trademark, and what is not? If we have to depend on the courts every time someone wants to use a word that also happens to be trademarked, the chilling effect on paid search could be significant. "

The point is that defendants' use of the trademark was in commerce, and they enjoyed an economic benefit.

Further, The question is not necessarily of balance, but of value. As the holder of the mark, Playboy's position is no different than other mark holders that are far more agressive in their enforcement, such as Gucci. Trademark value preservation is the goal, value erosion is what Playboy wants to prevent. This is really only the tip of the iceberg of current search engines' erosion of value.

Battelle writes regarding Yahoo's coming split with Google. Google is not necessarily the gorilla, and this is not necessarily good for Google. Yahoo has a significant war chest, and a varied revenue stream. Advertisers with Yahoo stores need not apply to advertise on the AOL network; you are turned away. The competitors in the space know who's who, and behave accordingly. If the resurrected  Playboy vs Netscape (by the Ninth Circuit - see http://news.com.com/2100-1024-5142058.html) results in precedent favorable to the mark holder, in this case Playboy, Google will have a larger liability exposure to any fall-out. The 'we are (just) an ISP' defense doesn't really cut it.
And why should Google benefit by being the underdog? Are you going to lead the market or not? Google's technological stance is quite singular among the search engines, they are after all the one with the 'algorithm' and can easily be considered the mother of heuristic search. The thin veneer of a democratic algorithm is largely worn away by the actual site-building community. If Google is a technology company, they should fight their way to a leadership position and Lead a charge.

Ole Eichhorn presents a case laden with facts purporting mankind is getting dumber (a lower IQ) over time. If you're still surfing the internet and browsing high-traffic sites, surely you haven't missed what are becoming ubiquitous IQ test come-ons from emode. What a fascinating way to collect demographics to sell to advertisers; emode appeals to the narcissisist. After all, who wants to admit being a brick short of a full load?

Thanks to Kottke's blog on Battle Search Engine, we've stumbled onto John Batelle's Search Blog Good job keeping up with what arguably could be the next net bust. Get set for large marketing roll-outs as msn and yahoo implement share pushes as they move out of beta.

iPods are cool, and it's big news for Apple to license said thingy to Hewlett Packard (discussed here on Daring Fireball.) I wonder if HP will lend any velocity to the iPods continuing development (think about their inkjet product life cycle.)

Posting blog entries by email .. gottahavit. You've earned space on the worthy list!

The need to have technical brainpower running in problem solving mode running amuck, is not that different than unchecked feature programming  - the pm's dreaded featuritis. It's actually an 'insanity check.'

World Magazine posted the question: Will liberals dominate the new technological frontier? in their blog.

The basic premise breaking technological adoption into liberals and conservatives implies a 'digital divide' that might be explained by macro-demographics such as age and gender. Using a political label is a flawed premise to begin with. "Liberal use computers, conservatives don't?"  "Liberals use the internet, conservatives don't? The viewpoint is over general, stereotyping, and betray a fear of the unknown.

How does your addy wind up receiving those things in your inbox? (The ones you didn't ask for?) Our suspicion has always been the senders generate massive lists of names appended with @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, @aol.com, and etc. The right side of the @ only need be a couple of handful of known ISP's and the left side is the product of name generators. Of course they exist, just go through the exercise of opening an account at any of the aforementioned, and YOUR name is gone, but there are plenty of suggestions proffered!
Get a random name generator at kleimo.com. This link courtesy of the scriptygodddess. (note: we preprended s..goddess with 'the', not she.) And as she points out, great for name and password generation.

What if AOL Yahoo and Microsoft allowed us to add to the web-based mail headers? Don't think so.

The folks at Habeus who are supposed to be ?? good spam ?? want those three, that arguably own 80% or 90% or more of the mail accounts in the US, to allow header editing.

Yeah right. What they want is to become the defacto postage stamp on the sending of e-mail. It's no wonder AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail just say 'No' to Habeas headers.

The Habeas site states" special note for web based e-mail systems like Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail. While you can still get the benefit of Habeas for email you receive, you cannot presently use Habeas SWE in your outbound mail. We encourage you to contact support@(your service name) and ask that they allow you to include Habeas headers in your outgoing email."

All the'good spam' companies (including spam filters, black hole operators, and any model build on addressing spam) are suspicious. If their model really worked, they'd be out of business, having solved the problem.

Next to flags, currency and stamps define authorities. It's interesting to note a feature built into Photoshop, that prevents currency manipulation. According to BoingBoing.net, the Photoshop CS automatically detects images of US currency.

This of course might prevent sarcastic usage of the coins of the realm, such as the wonderfully funny examples here. And (if globalised, after all, it's just another feature hidden or not) just plain money depictions as here.

This revealing connect-a-dot would not be possible either!  For all the subliminal marketers out there, can we expect to see a new layout every election cycle? This one is hilarious and is a must see. Link courtesy of Squoogy.

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