Former Republican Florida Governor Charlie

Crist, who extended early voting hours in 2008 by executive order to address long lines during that presidential election, said he was approached about early voting but told the GOP consultants and staffers that he would veto any proposed legislative changes that would reduce early voting.

“The people that worked in Tallahassee felt that early voting was bad, ” Crist said. “And I heard about it after I signed the executive order expanding it. I heard from Republicans around the state who were bold enough to share it with me that, ‘You just gave the election to Barack Obama.’”

It wasn’t until Gov. Rick Scott took office in January 2011 that the idea went anywhere. It passed the legislature that session and Scott signed it into law.

“I assume they decided, ‘It’s 2011, Crist is gone, let’s give it a shot,’” Crist said. “And that’s exactly what they did. And it is exactly what it turned out to be.”

Former Florida GOP leaders say voter suppression was reason... | www.palmbeachpost.com

The premise of the study is this: take the 210 television media markets in the United States, figure out how many college football fans they have, and then allocate them between the 120 current Football Bowl Subdivision programs.

A very interesting set of charts and data about college football.

The Geography of College Football Fans (and Realignment Chaos) - NYTimes.com

Right after the Presidential election last week, Chris Sprigman and Kal Raustiala penned an opinion piece suggesting that one way the Republicans could "reset", and actually attract the youth vote, would be to become the party of copyright reform. We had actually wondered if that was going to happen back during the SOPA fight, when it was the Republicans who bailed on the bill, while most of those who kept supporting it were Democrats. Since then, however, there hadn't been much movement. Until now. Late on Friday, the Republican Study Committee, which is the caucus for the House Republicans, released an amazing document debunking various myths about copyright law and suggesting key reforms.

Of course, this lasted all of about 24 hours...

Update: Wow. It took less than 24 hours for the RSC to fold to Hollywood pressure. They have now retracted the report and attempted to claim that it was not properly vetted.

So here is the big question - what do Republicans really want?

1. Free markets
2. A way to appeal to younger voters
3. A way to siphon off some of the money Hollywood donates to Democrats

(Tonight I'm probably going to have a nightmare in which I'm asked to make a political choice between 4th amendment protections and limited copyrights.)

House Republicans come out, briefly, as the Internet Party

Rep Lofgren - Thank you for coming to this forum and asking for comments on this important issue.

A website is a forum for expression, both by the operator and potentially the users as well, so any takedown has first amendment implications. It is important to consider the first amendment rights of the website users as well as the website operators. In general, websites should not be taken down unless the operators (and not just a user) of the website are likely guilty of violating the law. In cases where websites have both legitimate and illegitimate uses and users, efforts should be taken to minimize the impact of seizures to users who are actually violating the law. It may not make sense to take the entire site down in such a case - in fact I think that sort of action should be an absolute last resort.

Approval from a court should be required before any site is taken down. (Earlier this year a startup called JotForm had its domain pulled by the United States Secret Service for no apparent reason and AFAIK with no judicial process whatsoever - this shouldn't be happening.)

Takedowns should only take place if there is no other way to stop the criminal activity on the site. A standard similar to that for a preliminary injunction might be appropriate in the case that a website needs to be taken down - law enforcement should demonstrate that a criminal claim against the website operators is likely to succeed on the merits based on evidence already assembled, the harm associated with keeping the website up is greater than that associated with taking it down, and there is no reasonable alternative that would have a more minimal impact. Website operators should have speedy access to a forum in which to contest any of the facts that led to the approval for seizure (including the assertion that there is no alternative to total seizure of the site). Reportedly Dajaz1 spent a year trying to contest the facts of their seizure - that sort of delay is far too long.

As you can see from the comments on this forum, there are a variety of related intellectual property issues that Reddit users are concerned about. A theme that appears in many of these posts is a concern about the lack of effective deterrents for fraudulent or inappropriate DMCA takedown notifications. Although the DMCA allows for misrepresentation claims, AFAIK only 3 have been made during the existence of the statue. Certainly, the number of inappropriate DMCA takedowns is vastly larger, leading to the perception that this deterrence tool is not working.

I think this community is broadly concerned about the use of inappropriate copyright claims as a censorship mechanism, regardless of whether or not they involve the DMCA's takedown provisions. Many of the concerns about the DMCA relate to the way that the anti-circumvention provisions threaten computer security researchers, reverse engineers, and other technical professionals whenever they do something that large tech companies dislike - regardless of whether they've done something results in actual copyright infringement. The EFF published a paper titled Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years Under the DMCA which documents many examples. Some of those examples involve activities that are prohibited by the law. Others involve misrepresentations. It is difficult in our legal system for an individual citizen to contest a legal misrepresentation being made by a large organization due to the expense associated with defending one's self in court.

Thank you for your time.

_decius_ comments on Rep Zoe Lofgren Asks Reddit Users to Crowdsource Domain Name Seizure Legislative Proposal

MakerBot has just opened its first retail store on Mulberry Street in lower Manhattan -- a great neighborhood, by the way, and a perfect place for a 3D printing store. The store includes many wonderments, including a 3D photo booth, where you get your head scanned and then printed out.

I honestly think there is a fair amount of money to be made putting franchises of this in malls.

MakerBot opens a NYC store with a 3D photo booth - Boing Boing

People believe that memory is like a video or files stored in some sort of computer. But it's not like that at all. Memories are actually constructed anew each time that you remember something.

Each time you take an old activation sequence in your brain and re-construct it; like building a toy airplane out of Lego and then smashing the Lego, putting it back into the box, and building it again. Each time you build it it's going to be a little bit different based on the context and experience you have had since the last time you created it.

Mind games: Why everything you thought you knew about yourself is wrong - Features - Books - The Independent

It sounds an awful lot like AT&T and the FBI have just convicted someone of a crime because they exposed a security vulnerability and AT&T was embarrassed. Usually in these cases there is something more going on, but its not obvious to me that there is this time.

The guy isn’t a criminal. He wasn’t trying to profit. He simply noticed that AT&T had made user accounts publicly available, and published proof. He believed that since the information was publicly available he was not exceeding authorization. He stuck his head up above the herd.

More information is here. A bunch of IRC chat logs are included wherein the idea of committing a crime (such as insider trading) is discussed. Joking around on IRC about committing a crime is not the same thing as actually committing a crime. Its not clear to me what crime was actually committed (other than possession of narcotics).

Unless there is some key fact not here in evidence I think this is going to do tremendous harm to the relationship between the law enforcement and the hacker community.

Update: After some reading about this I'm not sure I agree with Robert Graham's position. I posted the following to the thread:

After some consideration and reading I think there might be more of a grey area here than the framing of this post lets on. However, I am not fully aware of all of the technical details in this case, so if I am misrepresenting how this actually worked, by all means, please correct me.

I agree that changing a value like "articleId=31337" in order to access data is not fraud, because the numbers are sequential and not personally identifying, so they don't constitute an access control, and changing them is not an act of deception.

On the other hand, imagine a website with a value in the URL like "password=31337". Your personal password is "31337" and when you access this page it provides you with your personal data. Other people have other passwords on the system and when the value of the password field is changed to someone else's value, you get to see their data. Otherwise you get an error message. The password values are not sequential, but if you tried a large number of them you would successfully guess many active passwords.

Although this would be a stupid way to design a website, I think we'd agree that writing a program to brute force guess many of these passwords and running that program on the live site would be a crime (an act of fraud), because the passwords identify the individual requesting data, so presenting someone else's password is an act of deception.

Now, lets imagine a third scenario - a website with a value like "SSN=078-05-1120". If you put someone else's Social Security Number in that field, you get access to their personal data. Social Security numbers aren't sequential, but if you t... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Errata Security: You are committing a crime right now

During SOPA I saw firsthand the Reddit community's strong dedication to free expression. Because of that dedication, I thought I would attempt an experiment: crowdsourcing a legislative proposal on Reddit. The goal of the legislation would be to build due process requirements into domain name seizures for copyright infringement. I'd like your thoughts on the proposal.

Rep Zoe Lofgren Asks Reddit Users to Crowdsource Domain Name Seizure Legislative Proposal - Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren

My third point is that what saves elections isn't the tech in the voting machines, but the tech in mobile phones that can take video like this. Apparently, half a million people have used Instagram to show their ballots, which is apparently illegal in some states. Laws need to change to make taking pictures a core part of preventing election fraud.

Errata Security: Why voting machines suck

I was looking at the amazing 2012 election maps created by Robert J. Vanderbei (Princeton) and Mark Newman (Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan), and although there is a very interesting blended voting map (Most of the country is some shade of purple, a varied blend of Democrat blue and Republican red) what I really wanted was this blended map with a population density overlay.

Best map of the election that I've seen so far.

Chris Howard's Writing & Art: America really looks like this