Premier Election Solutions, formerly called Diebold Election Systems, has finally admitted that a ten-year-old error has caused votes to be dropped. It's unclear if this error is random or systemic. If it's random -- a small percentage of all votes are dropped -- then it is highly unlikely that this affected the outcome of any election. If it's systemic --...

Laptops aboard the International Space Station have been infected with the W32.Gammima.AG worm. And it's not the first time this sort of thing has happened....

It's all about the captions: ...doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don't need Photoshop. You don't need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don't need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption. The photographs presented by Colin...

In eerily similar cases in the Netherlands and the United States, courts have recently grappled with the computer-security norm of "full disclosure," asking whether researchers should be permitted to disclose details of a fare-card vulnerability that allows people to ride the subway for free. The "Oyster card" used on the London Tube was at issue in the Dutch case, and...

Interesting: the solution to one problem causes another. "The rigorous studies clearly show red-light cameras don't work," said lead author Barbara Langland-Orban, professor and chair of health policy and management at the USF College of Public Health. "Instead, they increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop at camera intersections." Comprehensive studies from North Carolina, Virginia, and Ontario...

Starting September 27th: a 36-foot-long, 330-lb female and a 20-foot-long, 100-lb male....

Interesting paper: "Challenges and Directions for Monitoring P2P File Sharing Networks or Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice": Abstract -- We reverse engineer copyright enforcement in the popular BitTorrent file sharing network and find that a common approach for identifying infringing users is not conclusive. We describe simple techniques for implicating arbitrary network endpoints in illegal content sharing...

There's no profile: MI5 has concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in Britain, according to a classified internal research document on radicalisation seen by the Guardian. [...] The main findings include: • The majority are British nationals and the remainder, with a few exceptions, are here legally. Around half were born...

They break planes: Citing sources within the aviation industry, ABC News reports an overzealous TSA employee attempted to gain access to the parked aircraft by climbing up the fuselage... reportedly using the Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes mounted to the planes' noses as handholds. "The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to...

Nice article on personal surveillance from the London Review of Books....

Interesting: Preface The TCP/IP protocols were conceived during a time that was quite different from the hostile environment they operate in now. Yet a direct result of their effectiveness and widespread early adoption is that much of today's global economy remains dependent upon them. While many textbooks and articles have created the myth that the Internet Protocols (IP) were designed...

Contrary to popular belief, homicide due to mental illness is declining, at least in England and Wales: The rate of total homicide and the rate of homicide due to mental disorder rose steadily until the mid-1970s. From then there was a reversal in the rate of homicides attributed to mental disorder, which declined to historically low levels, while other homicides...

At this moment, Adi Shamir is giving an invited talk at the Crypto 2008 conference about a new type of cryptanalytic attack called "cube attacks." He claims very broad applicability to block ciphers, stream ciphers, hash functions, etc. My personal joke -- at least I hope it's a joke -- is that he's going to break every NIST hash submission...

This is interesting: Exactly who was behind the cyberattack is not known. The Georgian government blamed Russia for the attacks, but the Russian government said it was not involved. In the end, Georgia, with a population of just 4.6 million and a relative latecomer to the Internet, saw little effect beyond inaccessibility to many of its government Web sites, which...

Illegally diverting water is terrorism: South Australian Premier Mike Rann says the diversion of water from the Paroo River in Queensland is an act of terrorism during a water crisis. Anonymously threatening people with messages on playing cards, like the Joker in The Dark Knight, is terrorism: Giles County deputies arrest two county teenagers they say made terroristic threats to...

Wow: The provisional, 8,000-man Cyber Command has been ordered to stop all activities, just weeks before it was supposed to be declared operational....

An index of fiction. The site was inspired by Margaret Atwood's infamous comment that Oryx and Crake isn't really science fiction, because science fiction is "talking squids in outer space." This prompted a hunt for science fiction which actually did feature talking squids in outer space....

This comment is absolutely correct....

They said -- and it's almost too stupid to believe -- that: the balaclava "could be used to conceal someone's identity or could be used in the course of a criminal act". Don't they realize that balaclavas are for sale everywhere in the UK? Or that scarves, hoods, handkerchiefs, and dark glasses could also be used to conceal someone's identity?...

In the middle of a sensationalist article about risks to children and how giving them cell phones can help, there's at least one person who gets it. Since the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many parents feel better having a way to contact their children. But hundreds of students on cell phones during an emergency...