Passport not sufficient ID for Colorado DMV
posted by: Sara Gandy Web Producer Created: 10/30/2006 6:50 AM MST - Updated: 10/30/2006 7:09 AM MST
DENVER (AP) - A U.S. issued passport is fine for travel around the world, but not for driving around the block.
The Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles says it won't accept a federally-issued passport without a second form of identification when it comes to issuing a driver's license.
The reason? The state says the feds will issue a passport to someone under their nickname, or even without a birth certificate. That's not good enough when it comes to issuing a legal identification document.
Federal officials say the U.S. Passport is among the most secure personal identification documents in the world and they can't understand Colorado's stance.
This after Google gained so much praise for resisting earlier government requests for search records? I hope they are careful... They have so much to lose.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061030-8105.html
Google actively aiding intelligence agencies?
10/30/2006 11:10:59 AM, by Nate Anderson
Former intelligence officer Robert David Steele recently appeared on the Alex Jones show to make the provocative claim that Google is currently cooperating with secret elements in the US government, including the CIA.
Steele, who now runs OSS.net and is a proponent of open source intelligence, said that "Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government—that is a huge mistake and I'm hoping they'll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off." In his view, Google's attempt earlier this year to avoid turning over information to the Department of Justice was little more than a hypocritical charade.
Steele has made these claims for some time; back in January, he said the same things at a conference organized by his company at which several sources came forward and spoke about the alleged cooperation. According to security site HSToday.us, which had a reporter in attendance at the conference, one unnamed security contractor "said three employees of an intelligence agency he declined to identify are in Mountain View, Calif. where Google is based, working with the company to leverage the search engine company's user data monitoring capability in the interests of national security."
No hard evidence for these claims was presented, and those in a position to have direct knowledge of such an arrangement have been unwilling to speak about it on the record. Google traditionally prefers not to comment on such allegations, and did not respond to our requests for comment by press time.
It's clear that the company is not opposed to working with the intelligence and defense communities in principle. [Of course not. But how? Bob] Products such as Google Earth are explicitly marketed to such industries, with Google claiming that its products allow "analysts and operatives to get the job done effectively and in record time."
Whether the famously idealistic company is actively assisting the CIA and NSA is a different question, though, and one that remains unanswered. If the allegations have any merit, then it's no great stretch to imagine that other leading search engines have attracted the government's interest. Will major Internet companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google turn out to be as involved in surveillance as the telecommunications companies? Or did all these shadowy sources get the story wrong?
Here's a statistic I bet was made up...
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/30/1529208&from=rss
An Argument Against Software Patents
Posted by samzenpus on Monday October 30, @02:10PM from the share-the-software dept.
clndnng writes "Roughly 90% of web content consists of discussions of software patents, so it's a little surprising that Ben Klemens has written what may be the first dead-trees book analyzing their validity. It has a lot of ground to cover: you could approach the topic from the perspective of the geeks, the lawyers, the economists, or the businessmen. Klemens is equal-opportunity, addressing every perspective."
Read the rest of the review.
French publishers join Google booksearch lawsuit
Groups say Google illegally copied works
By Peter Sayer, IDG News Service October 30, 2006
An association representing 400 French book publishers has joined La Martinière Groupe in its lawsuit to stop Google Inc. from digitizing books for its Google Book Search service.
La Martinière filed suit against Google and its French subsidiary in a French court on June 6, accusing the search engine of counterfeiting. It asked the court to stop the search engine from scanning its books, and demanded €1 million (US$1.3 million) in damages. The publisher said Google had illegally copied at least 100 of its copyright works and included them in its Google Book Search without permission.
They did?
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012870.html
October 30, 2006
How the United States Institutionalized Privacy Oversight After 9-11
Rotenberg, Marc, "The Sui Generis Privacy Agency: How the United States Institutionalized Privacy Oversight After 9-11" (September 28, 2006). Available at SSRN.
"This article looks at the Chief Privacy Officer of the Department of Homeland Security, the President's Civil Liberties and Privacy Oversight Board, and the Civil Liberties Protection Officer of the Office of the National Intelligence Director. The article explores the circumstances under which the agencies were established and their legislative mandates. It reviews their activities to date and concludes that, measured primarily against their statutory responsibilities, only the DHS Chief Privacy Officer has had any meaningful impact on the privacy practices of the federal government."
Very clever... Possibly illegal?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20061030/181219.shtml
Record Labels Not Planning On Sharing YouTube Windfall With Musicians
from the it's-all-for-the-musicians,-huh? dept
Sure, YouTube might have a good legal defense to anyone who sued them for copyright infringement, but the lawsuits would still be pretty pricey. Not surprisingly, that was part of the sticking point in the negotiations between YouTube and Google before Google finally finally pulled the trigger. In order to make that issue go away, we already noted that YouTube did questionable deals with most of the major record labels the morning before they signed the Google deal -- effectively cutting them in on the deal. Now Mark Cuban is posting an email from an anonymous industry insider that provides a few more details while making the whole deal even more questionable. As the earlier article noted, YouTube was told to negotiate with effectively a blank check (signed by Google) with the record labels to get them to lay off YouTube for a while. But, here's where it gets interesting.
The deal was an investment, not a licensing agreement, meaning all that cash the labels got they don't actually need to share with the artists they always claim they're trying to protect. This was done on purpose.
While Google and YouTube have apparently put $500 million in escrow to deal with copyright lawsuits from smaller players, handing over cash to the labels came with a promise that the labels wouldn't sue YouTube for at least six months.
At the same time, they would sue other players in the space -- which we've already seen from Universal Music.
Add it all up, and you get the music labels effectively taking a bribe to cause trouble for Google/YouTube video competitors, ignoring YouTube to let it grow for a while, and pocketing all of the money without giving it back to the artists they supposedly represent. The claim is anonymous, but the pieces certainly fit together nicely. It would be nice to see an alternative explanation, as this whole thing reads pretty sleazy.
I'm not sure this is the next killer app, but it is in the area where most of the innovators are playing.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2006-10-29-brightcove_x.htm
Brightcove to take Web video to next level
Updated 10/29/2006 11:14 PM ET By David Lieberman, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — Brightcove will try to take Internet TV into the media mainstream Monday by unveiling a suite of services to help consumers find what they want — while easing the way for content providers to create slick-looking videos and generate revenue from them.
"It's going to open the floodgates of really interesting programming and a depth of media like what people have experienced in the text-Web world," says Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire. "We're right at the tipping point where broadband video goes from an experimental phase to a more mainstream phase."
Another angle on Internet video...
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/domino-effect.html
10/30/2006 10:55:00 AM Posted by George Strompolos, Google Video Team
A good viral video sets off a chain reaction that continues until nearly everyone has seen it, including your mom. The mad scientists known as EepyBird know a thing or two about chain reactions. They first rocketed into viral video fame by turning the explosive act of mixing Diet Coke and Mentos into an art form. Today they're back with a chain reaction like none other: 500 liters of Diet Coke and 1500+ Mentos, all triggered by the pull of one string.
Don't miss The Domino Effect -- a Google Video exclusive. In addition to being very fun, it demonstrates another interesting application of our Sponsored Video program -- this time with user-generated content. This helps producers like EepyBird earn revenue by pairing them up with our advertising partners.
We're excited to help compensate these independent producers for their creativity, and we can't wait to see who the next stars will be. If you have very compelling videos and are interested in this program, please get in touch.
http://www.physorg.com/news81346069.html
Generation of online libraries is born
Online book buffs can select from an array of Internet libraries, with hosts such as Google and Open Content Alliance, that promise to fetch written works at the clicks of computer mice.
While imperfect, the websites and their search engines have already opened extraordinary possibilities to readers and researchers in online communities worldwide.
- Google Book Search (http://books.google.com). By far the most known online library to date, the Google book project has scanned the pages of "thousands" of works into digital format.
Text from classics in the public domain is available in full. Summaries or snippets of books still under copyright are provided of books still under copyright protection.
A search engine taking the place of library card indexes makes it possible to seek authors' names, publication dates, or words or expressions in the texts or titles.
The oldest book in the Google virtual library to date was a Latin work from 1521. The number of books of the data base has remained secret. The collection contained many books from the 18th and 19th centuries and the majority were in English.
By typing a key word, the Net surfer gets a set of pages showing matching text highlighted in yellow. Editors can dictate whether portions or all the pages of works are made available online.
If the publisher or author has not given permission regarding copyrighted works, the search engine shows only the passages where the key words were found along with information about the book and where it can be bought or borrowed.
Classic works such as Dante's Inferno and the Encyclopedia of Diderot are available in their entirety, sometimes for download in printable format. Google does not put advertising in the works.
- Open Content Alliance (http://www.archive.org/details/texts): Most open.
For the moment the library has 35,000 scanned books, mostly in English. All of the works are not copyright protected -- often more than 50 years old -- and downloadable, printable, and free to be re-used for commercial purposes. The search engine is less sophisticated than that of Google Books but can scout out reference words if the quality of the scanned pages is sufficient.
- Windows Live Search Books, an online literature search engine being developed by Microsoft Computer, is slated for release "later this year."
The Windows Live Search Books Publisher Program website (http://publisher.live.com/) invites authors and publishers send their books to be scanned.
- Gallica, the site of the national Library of France. Lists 90,000 digitized books available in "image mode" but does not feature scanning by key words wihin page text.
- Specialized websites: offer text versions of digitized works, usually classics, that can be downloaded for reading or printing and allow searches by key words.
For example the site of "complete works of Shakespeare" (http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/) created in 1993 or the site of Molière (http://www.site-moliere.com/). Other sites highlight poetry, essays, books or other themes.
“Excuse me citizen, didn't you mean to say it this way?” (Amusing comment from England that “revokes” our independence...)
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/31/0429256&from=rss
Pentagon Reveals News Correction Unit
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday October 31, @04:16AM from the propaganda-juggernauts dept. The Media Politics
Jonas Wisser writes "BBC is reporting [US media has already been “corrected” Bob] that a newly created Pentagon unit has a mandate to fight 'inaccurate' news stories. From the article: 'The Pentagon has set up a new unit to focus on promoting its message across 24-hour rolling news outlets, and particularly on the internet. [...] A Pentagon memo seen by the Associated Press news agency said the new unit will "develop messages" for the 24-hour news cycle and aim to "correct the record". A spokesman said the unit would monitor media such as weblogs and would also employ "surrogates", or top politicians or lobbyists who could be interviewed on TV and radio shows.'"
Other than that, how'd we do?
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71999-0.html?tw=rss.index
Ohio Election Portends Trouble
By Kim Zetter 02:00 AM Oct, 31, 2006
Six years ago the world watched dumbfounded as the Florida 2000 fiasco exposed the messy underbelly of U.S. election administration. Since then states have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new electronic voting equipment to ensure that the nation would never experience such mishaps again.
But two recent and lengthy reports examining this year's May primary in Cuyahoga County, Ohio -- a pivotal state where the electoral votes gave President Bush his second win in 2004 -- make it clear that Florida-like fiascos are far from behind us.
The reports, totaling more than 500 pages, paint a disturbing picture of how million-dollar equipment and security safeguards can quickly be undone by poor product design, improper election procedures and inadequate training. From destroyed ballots and vote totals that didn't add up to lost equipment and breaches in security protocols, Cuyahoga's primary is a perfect study in how not to run an election.
The findings have ominous national implications. Cuyahoga County could play an important role in deciding two races in next week's election that will help decide which party controls the Senate and House. But one of the reports concluded that problems in the county were so extensive that meaningful improvements likely could not be achieved before that election, or even before the 2008 presidential election.
Moreover, few voting activists and election experts believe the problems are unique to Cuyahoga.
"I suspect that Cuyahoga County may be below average (in terms of how well it ran its election), but if you lift up the rock and look at election administration across the country, you'll see the same thing elsewhere," says David Dill, Stanford computer scientist and founder of VerifiedVoting.org, a proponent of paper-verified elections.
The problems in Cuyahoga County, a heavily Democratic county that encompasses Cleveland, began with a glitch in the design of the optical-scan ballots -- black lines separating sections of the ballot were too thick, and the fill-in bubbles were in the wrong place, preventing scanners from reading them.
The gaffe caused a six-day delay in election results, but wasn't insurmountable. The county hired an army of office temp workers to recast the votes from the 18,000 optical-scan ballots onto touch-screen machines -- both types of voting machines, made by Diebold Election Systems, were used in the county for the first time in the primary.
On the surface, that seemed to solve the problem. But a post-election audit of votes and election procedures revealed deeper issues in the way the state's most populous county ran its primary -- problems that, if not fixed, could open the state to serious legal challenges from candidates and voters in a close election.
Among the findings in one report (.pdf) prepared by the Cuyahoga Election Review Panel:
Due to poor chain of custody for supplies and equipment, 812 voter-access cards (which voters place in touch-screen machines to cast their ballot) were lost, along with 215 card encoders, which program the voter-access cards. Three hundred thirteen keys to the voting machines' memory-card compartments, where votes are stored, also went missing.
Officials set up two user accounts on the computer running vote-tabulation software, then assigned one password to both accounts and allowed multiple people to use them, thwarting any effort to identify individuals who might access and alter the system.
Sixty Board of Election employees took touch-screen machines home a weekend before the election to test a procedure for transmitting data on election night.
The election board hired 69 taxis to transport observers to precincts to collect memory cards and paper rolls on election night. But many cab drivers ended up gathering the materials themselves, and about half the cabs returned to the warehouse with election data, but no observer.
In at least 79 precincts the number of voters who signed the poll books didn't match the number of ballots cast. At least eight precincts had more ballots cast than registered voters. Because some polling places served several precincts, some of the discrepancies are explained by voters being directed to the wrong machines, an error that did not result in uncounted votes. But even when investigators tallied ballots and signatures for all precincts in a polling place, 15 locations still had mismatches. In one case investigators found 342 more voters than ballots.
There were also problems with tracking the voting machines themselves, according to a second report (.pdf) produced by the California-based Election Science Institute. ESI was hired before the election by Cuyahoga's Board of Commissioners to audit the election and measure the accuracy, reliability and usability of the county's new voting machines.
Out of 467 touch-screen machines assigned to 145 precincts that ESI audited, officials couldn't locate 29 machines after the election, despite days of searching. And 24 machines that were found had no data on them. "All their paperwork says (the machines) were deployed to polling locations but we can't figure out why there's no election data on them," says ESI founder Steve Hertzberg.
It's possible the machines were sent to polls but never used -- perhaps they malfunctioned or voter turnout was so low the machines weren't needed. But so far no explanation has been forthcoming. Cuyahoga County election director Michael Vu responded to initial questions from Wired News, but did not respond to follow-up questions about the missing machines and data
Experts say the chaos in Cuyahoga is a bellwether of broader election-administration problems nationwide.
"It should be a general wake-up call for all states and localities to make sure they have addressed these problems in their statutes and procedures to make sure that they don't run into the same problems," says Thad Hall, a political science professor at the University of Utah who assisted with the ESI report. "People should be taking all of this very seriously."
Beyond sloppy procedures, the ESI report found technological problems with the printers installed on the county's 5,000 new Diebold touch-screen machines. The printers produce the voter-verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT, mandated by a new Ohio law.
The printer problems turned up when the ESI team set out to examine the accuracy of the touch-screen machines. The team compared four sets of vote data from a sampling of 145 precincts. The data included electronic votes recorded on removable memory cards (used to tally the official count); electronic votes on flash memory inside the touch-screen machines; individual ballots on the paper-audit trail rolls; and a summary total of those ballots printed at the end of the paper roll.
Although the majority of the paper rolls were easy to read, 40 rolls contained ballots that were physically compromised in some way: Rolls were crumpled accordion-style due to paper jams; ballots were printed atop one another, making them illegible; rolls were torn and taped. Eighty-seven rolls were missing entirely.
The compromised ballots and missing paper rolls demonstrate that the paper trails voting activists spent three years pressuring states to mandate could be useless in a recount. Per Ohio's recount law, and laws in 14 other states that mandate paper trails, the paper roll is the official ballot in a recount.
But the law doesn't address what to do when paper records are illegible. An administrative rule from the secretary of state says the official ballot would revert to the electronic record if the paper trail were illegible or destroyed, which, in theory, would get every vote counted.
VerifiedVoting.org's Dill cautions that if just 10 percent of an election's paper rolls are compromised, the purpose of the paper is defeated, and a door is once again open for someone to rig an election.
"If someone wanted to fix an election they could program the machine to produce a certain number of faulty paper ballots so that (officials) had to count the electronic ones instead," Dill says.
The machines should be designed to shut down if the printer jams or poll workers load the paper improperly, says Dill.
Dan Tokaji, assistant professor of law at Ohio State University, says the issue of illegible ballots and conflicting recount laws clearly weren't well thought out in advance by Ohio lawmakers.
"It's quite possible we could see litigation over this issue in the event of a close election," he says, noting that the same problem could arise in other states. "We know about the problems with paper trails in Cuyahoga, but in other counties both in and out of Ohio we really haven't done a careful assessment. So I don't think we know how widespread the problems with the VVPAT system are."
And unfortunately, he says, most people don't worry about the problems or fix them until after there's a blowup similar to what occurred in Florida.
Vote discrepancies also turn up in the ESI audit, and voting activists seized on this aspect of the investigation as evidence that there were problems with Diebold's software. On about 80 paper rolls, the votes totaled from the individual ballots didn't match the summary of votes at the end of the roll. In most cases the count was off by one to five votes, but in some it was off by more than 25.
Here, too, paper jams were the culprit, says Gary Smith, director of elections in Forsyth County, Georgia, who led the paper count for ESI. Printer problems led to missing and illegible ballots, causing the final numbers to be higher than the sum of the individual ballots. When his team printed fresh paper records from the memory cards, the totals from individual ballots matched the summaries at the end of the rolls.
The ESI audit also uncovered mismatches between paper-vote totals and the digital totals from the memory cards, and 13 cases in which the removable memory cards and the flash memory inside the machines didn't match up.
Diebold said there are innocent explanations for why memory card totals didn't match flash memory totals. Eleven of the discrepancies were a side effect of election workers' transference of botched optical-scan votes onto touch-screen machines. Because they failed to also add the optical-scan votes to the flash-memory data from those machines, the two sets of data didn't match when ESI compared them.
The other two discrepancies occurred when poll workers placed memory cards in the wrong machines, then moved the cards to the correct machines after voters had already cast a few ballots on the machines -- a switch that did not affect the voting tally, but seriously complicated the audit afterward. When election staff gave ESI data for those machines, they were unaware that some votes on these memory cards were backed up on the flash memory of other machines.
Cuyahoga County election director Vu says his staff has verified Diebold's conclusions but ESI has not had a chance to independently verify the explanations. However, all these issues point to the most important finding from Cuyahoga County, says Hertzberg: it was so difficult for ESI to get accurate and complete data to conduct its recount.
ESI had been assured by Vu's office that the data ESI was auditing did not include optical-scan votes, says Hertzberg. In fact, ESI had to request data from Vu's office six times because it kept getting the wrong data, or data that was tainted with optical-scan votes.
Vu's staff also had a dozen different versions of the same vote data but no file-management system or naming conventions to keep track of them or explain why so many versions existed, says Hertzberg. "So these guys were sitting there trying to search for which data set to give us and they couldn't figure it out," he says.
Political scientist Michael Alvarez of the Caltech/MIT Voting Project, who helped with the ESI report, agrees: Although many people focused on the vote discrepancies, the fact that ESI found it so difficult to conduct an audit is the biggest problem, and it doesn't bode well for what could happen in November or in a close presidential race.
"An independent entity, be they ESI or be they anybody else ... should be able to walk in and very easily replicate that election outcome," Alvarez says. "That's the sort of thing that is what induces voter and candidate and media confidence in the process."
Vu says his office was overwhelmed with the task of adjusting to new procedures and equipment. His staff also never anticipated that poll workers would swap memory cards between machines; they're addressing this issue in poll worker training for November. "For the most part," he says, "the majority of the county did relatively well."
Hertzberg worries that things could be worse Nov. 7 because turnout is expected to be larger than in the primary. Cuyahoga has 1 million registered voters. Hertzberg urged Vu to develop and practice a manual count procedure before Election Day, but says there's been no movement.
"It's going to take time," Vu says. "You can't go from having problems in one election to perfection in the next election." Vu says he has made some changes for November, but mentions only issues with poll worker training, pay and recruitment.
The county Board of Elections and Board of Commissioners did recently appoint The Center for Election Integrity at Cleveland State University to monitor progress in the implementation of reforms recommended by the two reports, and the group will monitor the county's actual conduct during elections.
Another legal tool...
http://techdirt.com/articles/20061030/232327.shtml
Abusing The DMCA To Shut Up Critics
from the what-a-wonderful-law dept
There are plenty of problems with the DMCA, that are highlighted here often enough, but one that doesn't get very much attention is the fact that, beyond the standard "notice & takedown" procedure, anyone who claims that their content has been infringed online can then file a claim to reveal who posted/provided/uploaded the content in question. No lawsuit needs to be filed. No proof needs to be in place to show that there was actual infringement. For obvious reasons, that has the potential to be widely abused. Three years ago, there was a case where a porn site used this provision to subpoena ISPs to find out the identity of those who visited its site. This was also at the core of the nasty court battle between various ISPs (headed up by Verizon) against the RIAA, which eventually meant that the RIAA actually had to file John Doe lawsuits before demanding the identity of people. Considering how many takedown notices are improper, it seems only reasonable that you should be required to actually, you know, prove that something wrong happened before you can find out the names of people online. Unfortunately, it's still not the case. The EFF is fighting back against a company that has used this aspect of the DMCA to try to unmask the names of people who uploaded a video documentary critical of them. Obviously, the organization in question (a very controversial group) does not own the copyright. However, that doesn't stop them from using the DMCA to try to find out who uploaded the documentary. The organization is claiming that they can make a DMCA claim, based on the fact that some of their copyrighted content appears in the film -- though, the EFF points out that this is clearly fair use (which is allowed for the purpose of criticism). The EFF claims, and seems to have considerable support, that this is a case where the DMCA is being abused to go after critics of an organization, rather than for any real effort to protect copyrights.
If you act like a cartoon character...
http://www.xboxic.com/news/1882
Thompson to Midway: “cease and desist immediately”
Posted in Games, Xbox by Chris Benoit23 on October 29th, 2006 at 20:38
Playstatic user Jack Thompson, a lawyer from Florida who became fairly well known last year during the GTA: San Andreas “scandal”, has requested that the developer of Mortal Komat: Armageddon, Midway Games, “…cease and desist immediately from the distribution of this game…”.
“It has today come to my attention that the newly recently Mortal Kombat: Armageddon contains an unauthorized commercial exploitation of my name, photograph, image, and likeness within the game.”
“You are commanded to cease and desist immediately [emphasis Thompson’s] from the distribution of this game because of this unauthorized, illegal content…”
Geek stuff
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/cheat-sheets-static.html
Cheat Sheet Round-Up: Ajax, CSS, LaTeX, Ruby…
October 30th, 2006
Whether you’ve forgotten the name of a function or the property of a cascading style sheet - handy cheat sheets deliver the information you are looking for - immediately. Most cheat sheets are available as .pdf or .png-files, so you can print them and use them every day for whatever projects you’re currently working on. We present an extensive overview of useful cheat sheets we’ve found in the Web.
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