] EFF last week called on IEEE members and other citizens
] to voice their concerns about the standard. Nearly five
] hundred people wrote to IEEE leadership pointing out
] flaws in the draft standard. On September 22, the first
] working group ballot on the draft failed overwhelmingly,
] causing the simultaneous ballot at the sponsor level to
] fail as well.

EFF: Flawed E-Voting Standard Sent Back to Drawing Board

ICANN has set up a clearing house for information about the Verisign incident. There are some documents up here that are new.

ICANN | Information Page: Verisign's Wildcard Service Deployment

] When David Fitzpatrick's software for tracking and
] analyzing junk e-mail didn't work correctly, the Web
] designer assumed he had made programming mistakes and
] spent hours trying to fix them.
]
] Then he discovered it wasn't his skills that were faulty,
] but the Internet that essentially broke. Elsewhere, more
] spam slipped through, printers misbehaved and cell phones
] got unusual Web traffic.
]
] "I'm upset about this because it's cost us time and
] money," said Fitzpatrick, who runs Lone Star Interactive
] in Arlington, Texas, and tracks spam on the side.

There is little new in this story, but it reflects a number of stories I've heard from people who were troubleshooting various things the day sitefinder went live and ended up spending hours trying to figure it out before they realized the responses were coming from the root...

Engineers caught by suprise by Verisign while troubleshooting problems...

] Despite the Internet community's near unanimous outcry
] against the Site Finder service, it quickly learned just
] how powerless it has become. ICANN, the supposed steward
] of the domain name system, took until Friday evening
] to issue a weak statement calling on VeriSign to
] voluntarily suspend the Site Finder service while it
] reviewed the matter....
] Regardless of the eventual outcome, Internet users will
] look back on the day that Internet governance mattered
] and remember that they didn't.

[Politech] Michael Geist's column on VeriSign's domain name redirection

] Before a few days ago it didn't matter whether VeriSign
] was the owner or a caretaker. Now it matters a lot.
] VeriSign kicked a sleeping dog. It's a bizarre thing to
] do. Was it really VeriSign's decision to make,
] unilaterally? Did it need permission to make this
] decision?

ONLamp.com: Paul Vixie on VeriSign [Sep. 23, 2003]

] We call on ICANN to examine the procedures for changes in
] service, including provisions to protect users from
] abrupt changes in service.
]
] We call on the IAB, the IETF, and the operational
] community to examine the specifications for the domain
] name system and consider whether additional
] specifications could improve the stability of the overall
] system. Most urgently, we ask for definitive
] recommendations regarding the use and operation of
] wildcard DNS names in TLDs and the root domain, so that
] actions and expectations can become universal.

This really didn't get much coverage yesterday given that it came out shortly after Verisign's arrogant response. Its interesting. If ICANN could do something, this document would specifically say "Verisign is in violation of XYZ." It doesn't. What it says is that rules need to be reconsidered and clarified. IE, what they have done is not against the current rules. ICANN has the right under their contracts to create new policies, and Verisign must abide by those policies once they are approved within a reasonable period of time. This document is part of a long documentation trail that will ultimately result in Sitefinder getting shutdown. This process could take years. There are a number of methods that Verisign can use to delay things, including disputing the ICANN process, and filing a breach of contract suit along with a request for preliminary injunction preventing any new ICANN regulation from taking effect, and then delaying and delaying and delaying on going to trial, and then appealing and appealing... Once the court process is over with Verisign gets 4 months to implement any change ICANN requires. Furthermore, we're not anywhere near that stage yet. We are miles away. There is all kinds of IAB, IETF, and ICANN beaurocratic bullshit that has to occur first.

I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt it. They should have had a clause in the contract that prevents Verisign from making disruptive changes without seeking approval. They don't. This is a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, and Verisign just did. By the time this actually gets resolved will we have been living with it for so long that no one will notice.

If this issue is not resolved by Phreaknic I will use my speaking time there to call for a move to a DNS system that exists outside of ICANN's control. Its not really their fault, but this situation cannot be allowed to go on for years.

ICANN can't do anything...

] Activists have also questioned the political affiliations
] of the leading voting companies. Late last year, Harris
] found that Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, used
] to run the voting company that provided most of the
] voting machines in his state. And in August, the
] Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Walden O'Dell, the
] CEO of Diebold, is a major fundraiser for President Bush.
] In a letter to fellow Republicans, O'Dell said that he
] was "COMMITTED TO HELPING OHIO DELIVER ITS ELECTORAL
] VOTES TO THE PRESIDENT NEXT YEAR."
]
] But the problems Harris found in Diebold's system are
] perhaps the best proof yet that electronic voting systems
] aren't ready for prime time. Indeed, the vulnerabilities
] in the software, as well as the internal memos, raise
] questions about the legitimacy of the California recall
] election. In its ruling, the 9th Circuit Court put the
] election on hold until the six counties that currently
] use punch-card systems -- six counties that comprise 44
] percent of the state's voters -- upgrade their systems.
] On Monday, 11 judges on the 9th Circuit reheard the
] recall case; they may very well allow the election to go
] ahead on Oct. 7. If the recall vote is put on hold until
] March, however, many may wonder whether to trust the
] results: Four of the six punch-card counties -- including
] the largest, Los Angeles and San Diego -- have plans to
] upgrade to Diebold machines by March.

Very good article, with links to Diebold's internal memos, on the electronic voting systems.

I think that Harris is a conspiracy theorist. Certainly if the elections in Georgia were stolen that would be a historic fraud, a great mar on our history. However, it is not appropriate to allege that unless you've got proof. Saying "Oh, oh, oh, this might have occured..." simply serves to rile up people's emotions and it contributes to the ignorance and confusion that surrounds this issue. The quotes in the Diebold memos about "King County" are obviously not in reference to election fraud. Later in the same memo the same person discussess the concerns that Texas has about the use of this capability for such a purpose.

On the other hand, the Diebold memos demonstrate a complete lack of computer security clue on the part of the engineers. The fact that you have a password on your .mdb file isn't going to keep me out of it, in particular when you've handed me software that has access to it. Furthermore, the fact these morons are confident enough of their clue level to be poking fun at the "technical wizards" in the certifying companies is enough to turn the stomach.

All of these people simply seem to be in way the hell over their heads, and none of them seem to realize it.

Salon.com Technology | An open invitation to election fraud

] This will respond to the ICANN Advisory concerning
] VeriSign's Deployment of DNS Wildcard Service
] dated 19 September 2003. In the footsteps of several
] other registries that have done the same, we recently
] deployed a wildcard in the .com and .net zones.
] This was done after many months of testing and
] analysis and in compliance with all applicable technical
] standards. All indications are that users,
] important members of the internet community we
] all serve, are benefiting from the improved web
] navigation offered by Site Finder. These results
] are consistent with the findings from the
] extensive research we performed.

Verisign Responds to ICANN

] An international group of cryptographers, the Kryptos
] Group, announced this week that the decade-old Cyrillic
] Projector Code has been cracked, and that it deciphers to
] some classified KGB instructions and correspondence.
]
] The Cyrillic Projector is an encrypted sculpture at the
] University of North Carolina in Charlotte, that was
] created by Washington DC artist James Sanborn in the
] early 1990s. It was inspired by the encrypted Kryptos
] sculpture that Sanborn created two years earlier for CIA
] Headquarters.
]
] The message on the Cyrillic Projector has turned out to
] be in two parts. The decrypted first part is a Russian
] text encouraging secret agents to psychologically control
] potential sources of information. The second part appears
] to be a partial quote from classified KGB correspondence
] about the Soviet dissident Sakharov, with concerns that
] his report to the Pugwash conference was being used by
] the Americans for an anti-Soviet agenda.

Press Release: The Cyrillic Projector Code Has Been Solved

] On Tuesday, Sun researchers plan to report that they have
] discovered a way to transmit data inside a computer much
] more quickly than current techniques allow. By placing
] the edge of one chip directly in contact with its
] neighbor, it may be possible to move data 60 to 100 times
] as fast as the present top speeds.

New Sun Microsystems Chip May Unseat the Circuit Board