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Thursday, March 8, 2007
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The telecoms industry has been accused of
collecting excessive amounts of personal data from its customers, with
telecom firms faring worse for privacy than companies in other
industries.
The accusations come in the
"First Quarter 2007 Online Customer Respect Study of the
Telecommunications Industry", from international research... Editor: Just this teaser unless you register at their site.
7:27:48 PM 
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C-SPAN Unchains Congressional Hearing Videos. C-SPAN has announced that, effective immediately, its videos of Congressional hearings, White House briefings, and other federal events will be freely available for noncommercial copying, sharing and posting, so long as attribution is included (sounds like the Creative Commons by-nc license, but no confirmation on whether that's what they are using). According to the C-SPAN press release, the move recognizes that we're in "an age of explosive growth of video file sharers, bloggers and online citizen journalists."
This is fantastic news! A considerable helping of the credit belongs to Carl Malamud, who responded to a copyright kerfuffle involving House Speaker Nanci Pelosi's use of C-SPAN hearing footage by writing an open letter to C-SPAN's CEO Brian Lamb challenging him to open up the archives to enable these kinds of public uses of C-SPAN content. Several meetings later, it appears C-SPAN decided to rise to the challenge.
Kudos to Carl, and kudos to C-SPAN. This is an amazing bit of public service all around. (Full disclosure: EFF represented Carl in connection with this issue, but we hardly lifted a finger -- all credit goes to Carl.) [EFF: Deep Links]
Editor: Hmm maybe I'll have to consider making some snippets available in the future. A lot of hearings are dry, but every once in a while you get a real gem.
5:56:27 PM
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Yochai Benkler, Cory Doctorow, and Bruce Schneier Win EFF Pioneer Awards. Mark Cuban to Keynote Award Ceremony in San Diego
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce the winners of its 2007 Pioneer Awards: Professor Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School, writer and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow, and security technologist Bruce Schneier. Mark Cuban -- HDNet Chairman and NBA Dallas Mavericks owner -- will give the keynote address at the award ceremony. The 16th annual Pioneer Awards will be held at 7:30pm, March 27th, at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego in conjunction with the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.
Professor Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School researches the effects of laws on information, knowledge, and culture in the digital world. Benkler's important contributions include a theoretical explanation of how the Internet has allowed decentralized groups to produce things like technologies and bodies of knowledge more efficiently than any centrally organized corporation or trade-based marketplace could. After the publication of Benkler's most recent book, "The Wealth of Networks," Lawrence Lessig called him "the leading intellectual of the information age."
Cory Doctorow is an activist, writer, blogger, and public speaker about copyright, digital rights management, and electronic freedom. As a co-editor of the Boing Boing blog, he highlights critical technology issues for more than a million readers a day. Doctorow has lectured around the globe and has been nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards for his science fiction novels. Doctorow is currently the Canadian Fulbright Chair at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. He was EFF's European Affairs Coordinator until December of 2005.
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist acclaimed for his criticism and commentary on everything from network security to national security. His books -- including the highly influential "Secrets and Lies" and "Applied Cryptography" -- his monthly newsletter, and his security blog have reached hundreds of thousands of people with candid and lucid analysis of security issues. Schneier has often testified before Congress on security policy.
"This year's award winners have all provided important analysis and criticism of our digital world, educating the public on how electronic systems really work and what it means to us and our future," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "I'm thrilled to honor Yochai, Cory, and Bruce. They are truly pioneers of the electronic frontier."
Since 1991, the EFF Pioneer Awards have recognized individuals and organizations that have made significant and influential contributions to the development of computer-mediated communications and to the empowerment of individuals in using computers and the Internet. Past winners include World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, Linux creator Linus Torvalds, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, among many others.
Benkler, Doctorow, and Schneier were nominated by the public and then chosen by a panel of judges. This year's panel includes Kim Alexander (President and founder, California Voter Foundation), Esther Dyson (Internet court jester and blogger, Release 0.9; founding chairman of ICANN; former chairman of EFF), Mitch Kapor (Chair, Open Source Applications Foundation; co-founder and former chairman EFF), Drazen Pantic (Co-director, Location One), Barbara Simons (IBM Research [Retired] and former president ACM), James Tyre, (Co-founder, The Censorware Project; EFF policy fellow) and Jimmy Wales, (Founder, Wikipedia; co-founder, Wikia; chair emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation).
The Pioneer Awards are sponsored by Sling Media, the world's leading digital lifestyle company offering consumer services and products. Sling Media's product family includes the internationally acclaimed Slingbox that allows consumers to watch and control their living room television at any time, from any location, using PCs, Macs, PDAs and smartphones. For more information on Sling Media or the Slingbox, visit www.slingmedia.com.
Tickets to the Pioneer Awards ceremony and Mark Cuban's keynote address are $35. If you plan to attend, RSVP to events@eff.org. You can also pay for your tickets in advance at http://secure.eff.org/pioneerfundraiser. Members of the media interested in attending the event should email press@eff.org.
For more on attending the Pioneer Awards:
http://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer
Contact:
Katina Bishop
Associate Director of Development
Electronic Frontier Foundation
katina@eff.org [EFF: Breaking News]
5:39:43 PM
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How Computers Can Make Voting More Secure. By now there is overwhelming evidence that today[base ']s paperless computer-based voting technologies have such serious security and reliability problems that we should not be using them. Computers can[base ']t do the job by themselves; but what role should they play in voting?
It[base ']s tempting to eliminate computers entirely, returning to old-fashioned paper voting, but I think this is a mistake. Paper has an important role, as I[base ']ll describe below, but paper systems are subject to well-known problems such as ballot-box stuffing and chain voting, as well as other user-interface and logistical challenges.
Security does require some role for paper. Each vote must be recorded in a manner that is directly verified by the voter. And the system must be software-independent, meaning that its accuracy cannot rely on the correct functioning of any software system. Today[base ']s paperless e-voting systems satisfy neither requirement, and the only practical way to meet the requirements is to use paper.
The proper role for computers, then, is to backstop the paper system, to improve it. What we want is not a computerized voting system, but a computer-augmented one.
This mindset changes how we think about the role of computers. Instead of trying to make computers do everything, we will look instead for weaknesses and gaps in the paper system, and ask how computers can plug them.
There are two main ways computers can help. The first is in helping voters cast their votes. Computers can check for errors in ballots, for example by detecting an invalid ballot while the voter is still in a position to fix it. Computers can present the ballot in audio format for the blind or illiterate, or in multiple languages. (Of course, badly designed computer interfaces can do harm, so we have to be careful.) There must be a voter-verified paper record at the end of the vote-casting process, but computers, used correctly, can help voters create and validate that record, by acting as ballot-marking devices or as scanners to help voters spot mismarked ballots.
The second way computers can help is by improving security. Usually the e-voting security debate is about how to keep computers from making security too much worse than it was before. Given the design of today[base ']s e-voting systems, this is appropriate [~] just bringing these systems up to the level of security and reliability in (say) the Xbox and Wii game consoles would be nice. Even in a computer-augmented system, we[base ']ll need to do a better job of vetting the computers[base '] design [~] if a job is worth doing with a computer, it[base ']s worth doing correctly.
But once we adopt the mindset of augmenting a paper-based system, security looks less like a problem and more like an opportunity. We can look for the security weaknesses of paper-based systems, and ask how computers can help to address them. For example, paper-based systems are subject to ballot-box stuffing [~] how can computers reduce this risk?
Surprisingly, the designs of current e-voting technologies, even the ones with paper trails, don[base ']t do all they can to compensate for the weaknesses of paper. For example, the current systems I[base ']ve seen keep electronic records that are subject to straightforward post-election tampering. Researchers have studied approaches to this problem, but as far as I know none are used in practice.
In future posts, we[base ']ll discuss design ideas for computer-augmented voting.
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[Freedom to Tinker]
5:35:06 PM
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© Copyright 2007 Paul Hardwick.
Last update: 3/18/07; 8:16:15 PM.
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