As I May Think...

NIST condemns e-voting: Calls for "Software Independence"

[Updated 9-Dec-2006: The recommendations discussed below were later rejected by NIST. See the discussion of this insanity on /...]

A technical group sponsored by NIST, the US government's standard setting organization, has issued a draft report condemning the use of electronic voting. The NIST report calls for paper trails and builds on an earlier paper by Ron Rivest (of RSA fame) and John Wack which defined the concept of "Software Independence" in voting systems: The idea that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently of voting machine' software. The Washington Post correctly points out that this report "repeats the contention of the computer security community that "a single programmer could 'rig' a major election."

The report states:

... the lack of an independent audit capability in DRE [Direct Recording Electronic] voting systems is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections. NIST does not know how to write testable requirements to make DREs secure, and NIST’s recommendation to the STS [Security and Transparency Subcommittee] is that the DRE in practical terms cannot be made secure. Consequently, NIST and the STS recommend that VVSG 2007 should require voting systems to be of the SI [Software Independent] “class”...

The Future is now... Kurzweil on the coming Singularity

One of the things that I love about the computer business is that often even the wildest predictions can seem mundane and old hat as soon as they are made. Consider, for instance, Ray Kurzweil's recent presentation to the SC06 SuperComputing Conference in which, among other things, he predicts that soon:

... we'll routinely be in virtual reality environments. Instead of making a cell call, we could "meet" someone in a virtual world and take a walk on a virtual beach and chat. Business meetings and conference calls will be held in calming or inspiring virtual locations

Second Life underpopulated?

Akela Talamasca wonders on the Second Life Insider blog why there is such a disparity between the number of Second Life "residents" and those who are logged in at any one time.  Certainly, when less than 1% of the total resident population is online, one must wonder if there is a problem with Second Life. While there are many possible explanations, one may be that Second Life, like every "metaverse," "virtual world," or MMORPG, suffers from the demotivating effects of network latency, packet loss, or general "lag." We've learned to use our networks for things that they aren't quite ready for yet...

Chinese Blogs exploding with Sex and Housing Prices...

Today, Chinese state media announced that the number of blogs in China went over 34 million during August. That's more than existed in the entire world until very recently... Of course, as is the case in most areas, the Chinese have found that about 70% of existing blogs are actually dead or dormant... The article claims that 17 million people in China consider themselves to be "Bloggers" and about 75 million regularly read blogs.

Operating Amazon: Study reveals internal operations

A slow stream of publications is revealing some of the inner workings of Google but there is much less documentation of Amazon and other GAYME sites. Now, a paper summarizing Peter Bodik's recent Master's Thesis, based on research at Ebates.com and Amazon, provides some insight into the challenges of operating large scale web services. Bodik's paper, Advanced Tools for Operators at Amazon.com, was presented at HotAC'06 in June but seems to have so far attracted surprisingly little attention in the Blogosphere. [Greg Linden of Findory and Robin Harris of StorageMojo have recently commented on the paper.]

Bodik and his co-authors identify the main challenges facing operators at Amazon:

• Failure propagation
• Lack of global dependency knowledge
• Overwhelming amounts of low-level information

While these challenges are similar to those faced by any system operator, traditional large scale system operators who "work in large corporate data centers, usually administering third-party software that doesn’t change very often." An enterprise environment usually has a much more stable base of software and operators than does a place like Amazon where "hundreds of software developers, working also as operators, administer rapidly changing software." Thus, while in a traditional environment, a small stable set of operators might build up enough experience to be able to understand and troubleshoot the running software, at a place like Amazon, both the software and those who are attempting to operate it are constantly in flux. In order to address these situation, a number of experimental tools have been developed and are described in these papers.

Does scaling require protocol variants?

In a comment, Phil Aaronson correctly guesses that I was pleased to read in Google's Chubby paper that:

[Chubby's] ability to provide swift name updates without polling each name individually is so appealing that Chubby now provides name service for most of the company's systems.

As many know, I've often argued against the horrible waste that comes from polling for RSS and Atom syndication files. But feed syndication isn't the only application area where polling is overused. As Google demonstrates, polling simply doesn't scale for any system doing thousands or millions of DNS lookups per second. (Phil and I ran into many problems with overloading DNS servers while working on Web Traffic Analysis systems at Accrue Software...)

Google Lock Secrets Unlocked: Chubby unveiled...

Seekers after the inner secrets of Google have  undoubtedly been frustrated by the fact that several of the papers describing Google's internals refer to a distributed lock management service (Chubby)  but provide little information on the lock service's design or implementation. For example, the recently released paper on BigTable refers frequently to Chubby but points to a paper by Mike Burrows to be presented at OSDI'06 in November -- still two months away! Well, sometime in the last few days, Google published a pre-print of Burrows' paper. For the inside story on Chubby, and thus more to the story of BigTable, the Google File System (GFS), etc. see the paper: The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems .

Is Slashdot (/.) using DRM in email messages?

Is /. secretly inserting DRM codes into their email messages? Has Microsoft hidden email DRM code in Outlook? Read on to discover the truth!...

I subscribe to the daily email summary of Slashdot stories and have noticed lately that I can't "copy and paste" parts of the messages I receive. Often, I can "cut" or "copy" text from the top of the Slashdot email but I can't copy or cut text that appears later on in the message. On digging into this odd behavior, I've discovered that recent Slashdot messages are sprinkled with embedded digital codes that disable some copying functions in Outlook. The effect is DRM-like copy-protection!

Techmeme cannibalizes Memeorandum

"Playing with Alexa" today, I stumbled across a fairly striking case of cannibalization... Many may remember that on May 8, 2006 Gabe Rivera's popular Memeorandum site spun out it's technology section as TechMeme. It is well known that Techmeme has been successful in rapidly gaining a very respectable readership. But, what may not be as well known is that much of Techmeme's gain seems to have been at the direct cost of its parent --- Memeorandum. The "Alexa Rank" chart below tells the tale in graphic detail.

Zune DRM = Microsoft Hubris? Do corporations define the law?

Microsoft is neither judge, jury, nor legislature. Yet, they seem confident that they have the power to define, by fiat, what is "fair use" in digital media. The MS Zune iPod killer will apparently encourage users to believe -- incorrectly -- that fair use permits "three free plays" of copied media files. Thus, just as the Zune makes it mechanically easier for people to illegally copy digital media files between devices, Microsoft will be inducing them to do more illegal copying by confusing them about what is and is not permited by the law. Of course, at the same time that the Zune will encouage and induce illegal copying, it will also tend to make perfectly legal copying more difficult -- if not impossible.

One may argue that our legislatures have been slow in addressing the copyright issues that arise from the spread of the Internet and other new media, however, it can't be acceptable for a corporation, impatient for the resolution of some issue of public policy, to further their business goals by simply taking on themselves the roles that we assign exclusively and properly to our nation's law makers.