AP - A senior adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has agreed to plead guilty to drunken driving after the arresting officer was ordered to Iraq making a trial on a more serious charge impossible, police said Monday.
AP - Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton called on President Bush on Monday to appoint “an emergency working group on foreclosures” to recommend new ways to confront the nation’s housing finance troubles.
Politico.com - At a time when the GOP presidential nominee will need more assistance than ever, a number of state Republican parties are struggling through troubled times, suffering from internal strife, poor fundraising, onerous debt, scandal or voting trends that are conspiring to relegate the local branches of the party to near-irrelevance.
AP - Clinton calls for expert panel on housing crisis … Lawmakers urge Justice Department to investigate snooping of candidates’ passport records … Lessons from Keating scandal applied to McCain presidential campaign’
AP - The new pastor of Barack Obama’s Chicago church said during Easter Sunday services that recent national scrutiny of the church is a test that will only make the congregation stronger.
AP - Prominent supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama on Sunday both faulted Obama’s campaign for allowing a retired general and backer of the Illinois senator to equate comments by Clinton’s husband which appeared to question Obama’s patriotism to McCarthyism.
AP - Senators from both parties on Sunday urged the Department of Justice to investigate the unauthorized searches of the passport files of three presidential candidates by State Department contract workers.
AP - Sen. John McCain’s ethics entanglement with a wealthy banker ultimately convicted of swindling investors was such a disturbing, formative experience in his political career that he compares the scandal in some ways to the five years he was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
AP - Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in the Senate before she had even surrendered the title of first lady.
AP - Barack Obama refers to the past couple of weeks as a tough, turbulent stretch.
AP - Bill Richardson, the nation’s only Hispanic governor, backed Barack Obama for president Friday, moved to deliver his much-coveted endorsement by the senator’s speech about race.
AP - Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain said Friday that China is harming its world image with its crackdown in Tibet and expressed hope Beijing would seek a peaceful solution to the crisis.
Politico.com - John McCain had his second biggest fundraising month in February, pulling in $11 million mostly after he all but secured the GOP presidential nomination with a collection of big wins in the Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5.
AP - A federal appeals court dismissed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee over the party’s decision to strip Florida of its delegates to its national convention.
The EFF’s Fred von Lohmann just sent round a note on an email list about the summary judgment briefs in the WoW Glider case. I’ve mirrored the briefs here and here for those who are interested, and below the fold I’m gonna engage in rampant copyright infringement by reposting all of Fred’s message. He sums it up too well to bother trying to explain any better, and I’m sure that he’ll forgive the infringement…
Fred says:
Glider lets WoW players play on “autopilot” in order to maximize in-
game experience and loot. Blizzard has not been able to successfully
stop players from using it, despite the deployment of technical
countermeasures (i.e., “Warden”).Blizzard is arguing direct copyright infringement by WoW players who
use Glider (because they breach the EULA term that says “no bots!” and
copy the WoW software into RAM), and secondary liability for MDY, the
maker of Glider. Blizzard’s argument is built expressly on the MAI v.
Peak’s “RAM copies” doctrine, plus the argument that any contractual
breach of a EULA term creates an infringement claim, at least where
the license grant is expressly conditioned on compliance with the
contractual restriction (apparently the WoW license grant is
contingent on compliance with **all** the terms of the EULA, a typical
drafting approach in modern EULAs).Blizzard also argues 1201 liability, on the view that Glider evades
Warden. There is an interesting question here as to what copyrighted
work Warden restricts access to — Warden blocks access to Blizzard’s
WoW **servers**, not the client-side game software itself. Blizzard
seems to argue that certain client-side game assets — i.e., graphics
– are rendered inaccessible when Warden blocks an account for
cheating. But it’s fair to say that this is not the typical
“encryption” or “password” 1201 terrain.Finally, Blizzard argues tortious interference with the EULA, premised
on the same EULA whose breach is supposedly also a copyright
infringement.Interesting, no?
Fred
–
Fred von Lohmann
Senior Intellectual Property Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
AP - Prominent supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama on Sunday both faulted Obama’s campaign for allowing a retired general and backer of the Illinois senator to equate comments by Clinton’s husband which appeared to question Obama’s patriotism to McCarthyism.
AP - Senators from both parties on Sunday urged the Department of Justice to investigate the unauthorized searches of the passport files of three presidential candidates by State Department contract workers.
AP - Sen. John McCain’s ethics entanglement with a wealthy banker ultimately convicted of swindling investors was such a disturbing, formative experience in his political career that he compares the scandal in some ways to the five years he was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
I wrote yesterday about discrepancies in the results reported by Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines in New Jersey.
Sequoia issued a memo giving their explanation for what might have happened. Here’s the relevant part:
During a primary election, the “option switches” on the operator panel must be used to activate the voting machine. The operator panel has a total of 12 buttons numbered 1 through 12. Each party participating in the primary election is assigned one of the option switch buttons. The poll worker presses a party option switch button based on the voter authorization slip given to the voter after signing the poll book, and then the poll worker presses the green “Activate” button. This action causes that party’s contests to be activated on the ballot face inside the voting booth.
Let’s assume the Democrat party is assigned option switch 6 while the Republican Party is assigned options switch 12. If a Democrat voter arrives, the poll worker presses the “6″ button followed by the green “Activate” button. The Democrat contests are activated and the voter votes the ballot. For a Republican voter, the poll worker presses the “12″ button followed by the green “Activate” button, which then activates the Republican contests and the voter votes the ballot. This is the correct and proper method of machine activation when using option switches.
However, we have found that when a poll worker selects the lower of the two assigned selection codes, followed by pressing an unused selection code and then pressing the green “Activate” button, the higher numbered party on the operator panel has its contests activated instead while the selection code button for the original party stays active on the operator panel.
Using the above example with the Democrat Party as option switch 6 and the Republican Party as option switch 12, the poll worker presses button 6 for Democrat. The red light next to button number 6 lights up and the operator panel display will show DEM. The poll worker then presses any unused option switch. The red light stays lit next to option switch 6 and the display still says DEM. Now the poll worker presses the green “Activate” button. The red light stays lit next to button number 6, but the operator panel display now says REP and the ballot in the voting booth will activate the Republican party contests.
In each and every case where a machine displays the party turnout issue at the close of the polls, this is the situation that would have caused it, and it can be duplicated on any machine. In addition, for this situation to have occurred, the voter that was in the voting booth at the time of the poll workers action would have voted the opposite party ballot instead of telling the poll worker that the incorrect ballot was activated and the machine would not allow them to vote the party they intended. If they had informed the poll worker, they could have made the party selection change and the voter would have then voted the correct ballot style.
Several points are in order.
First, it’s obvious from this description, and from the fact that this happened on so many machines across the state, that even if Sequoia’s explanation is entirely correct, there was some kind of engineering error on Sequoia’s part that caused the machines to misbehave. Sequoia has tried to paint the anomalies as poll worker error, but that’s not plausible in light of Sequoia’s own explanation.
Consider the scenario described above: there is a moment when the red light next to the DEM button is lit, the operator panel displays DEM, then the poll worker presses the Activate button — and the Republican ballot is activated. No competent engineer would design a system to work that way.
No competent engineer would design this system to ever display REP in the operator panel while simultaneously lighting only the DEM light.
No competent engineer would design this system to ever activate the Republican ballot when the poll worker had pressed the DEM button but had not pressed the REP button.
Sequoia’s own explanation makes clear that they made an engineering error that caused the voting machine to behave incorrectly.
Second, this doesn’t look like fraud, only error. A malicious attacker who had access to a machine would have had much more powerful, and much less detectable, options at his disposal.
Third, Sequoia seems to avoid saying that what they describe is the only possible cause of such errors. Note the careful wording, “In each and every case where a machine displays [an error], this is the situation that would have caused it …” (emphasis added). They don’t say this “did” cause the errors; they say it “would have”. The sentence is either clumsy or artfully worded.
Fourth, Sequoia’s explanation involves a voter seeing the wrong party’s ballot being activated, and not complaining about it. Assuming (as press accounts say) that the problem happened about sixty times in New Jersey, one would expect that many voters noticed and complained. And one would expect that in at least one of those cases, a poll worker would have noticed that the operator panel was displaying REP and DEM at the same time. Yet there don’t seem to be reports of such behavior.
Fifth, Sequoia doesn’t characterize fully the cases where this problem might occur, so election officials don’t know, for example, which past elections might have been affected.
The bottom line is clear. An investigation is needed — an independent investigation, done by someone not chosen by Sequoia, not paid by Sequoia, and not reporting to Sequoia.
A copy of an email I received has been passed around on various mailing lists. Several people, including reporters, have asked me to confirm its authenticity. Since everyone seems to have read it already, I might as well publish it here. Yes, it is genuine.
====
Sender: Smith, Ed [address redacted]@sequoiavote.com
To: felten@cs.princeton.edu, appel@princeton.edu
Subject: Sequoia Advantage voting machines from New Jersey
Date: Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 6:16 PM
Dear Professors Felten and Appel:
As you have likely read in the news media, certain New Jersey election officials have stated that they plan to send to you one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines for analysis. I want to make you aware that if the County does so, it violates their established Sequoia licensing Agreement for use of the voting system. Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis. We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property.
Very truly yours,
Edwin Smith
VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification
Sequoia Voting Systems
[contact information and boilerplate redacted]
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