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September 22, 2004, 7:31 p.m. -- Last week's weblog

Day off tomorrow, back Friday.

Hacking the Presidential Election -- A Bipartisan Problem, Anyone Can Do It. That's the title of the press release for today's press conference at Washington's National Press Club at which voting activist Bev Harris (Black Box Voting) and computer experts demonstrated how election results could be changed.

And now the reports are rolling in. More overnight, I'd expect, as reporters who were there file for print deadlines.

Reuters reports that spokesmen for voting software manufacturers Diebold and Sequoia "said people were unlikely to get access to make any changes, and any attempts to alter the vote would be caught by security procedures already in place."

Nevertheless, all the campaigning, the volunteering, the time, money and effort is meaningless if the totals are electronically altered on election night. Safeguards and paper trails now could prevent a passel of Floridas on Nov. 3.

(Politicians of all stripes should be concerned. Hackers come in all stripes, too.)

Hacking the Vote: A Real and Present Danger: A release from the Institute for Public Accuracy boils it down:

At the National Press Club this morning, Harris and others demonstrated methods of manipulating vote-counting programs. Harris said: "We are able to use a hidden program for vote manipulation, which resides on Diebold's election software. This is a hidden feature enabled by a two-digit trigger (not a 'bug' or an accidental oversight; it's there on purpose). Also participating is Dr. Herbert H. Thompson, computer security expert and editor/author of 12 books including How to Break Software Security. Thompson shows how easily an election can be rigged by implanting a virus. Also, Jeremiah Akin, an independent computer programmer from Riverside, Calif., shows how to manipulate Sequoia Voting Systems software just before an election by switching the labels on the names of candidates. Andy Stephenson, associate director of Black Box Voting, shows how an unscrupulous person with no computer skills whatsoever can sabotage an election."

Activists Find More E-Vote Flaws: The crux of it, at Wired:

The vulnerabilities involve the Global Election Management System, or GEMS, software that runs on a county's server and tallies votes after they come in from Diebold touch-screen and optical-scan machines in polling places. The GEMS program generates reports of preliminary and final election results that the media and states use to call the winners....

Harris said the problem lies in the fact that GEMS creates two tables of data that don't always match. One table consists of rows showing votes for each candidate that were recorded on voting machine memory cards at each precinct. The other table consists of summaries of that precinct data. Officials use the raw precinct data to spot-check accuracy. For example, if all of the machines at a precinct record a total of 620 votes for Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the data in GEMS should show 620 votes for Schwarzenegger for that precinct. The official results that go to the state are based on the vote summaries produced by GEMS.

When election officials run a report on GEMS on election night, it creates the vote summaries from the raw precinct data. Then as absentee and provisional ballots get counted after Election Day and added into GEMS, the raw data numbers increase, while the vote summaries remain the same until the next time officials run a summary report and it regenerates totals from the raw precinct data.

Harris said it's possible to alter the vote summaries while leaving the raw data alone. In doing so, the election results that go to state officials would be manipulated, while the canvas spot check performed on the raw data would show that the GEMS results were accurate. Officials would only know that the summary votes didn't match precinct results if they went back and manually counted results from each individual polling place and compared them to the vote summaries in GEMS.

Diebold said because the two sets of data are coupled in GEMS it would be impossible for someone to change the summaries without changing the precinct data that feeds the summaries. And if they did, the system would flag the change.

But Harris said it's possible to change the voting summaries without using GEMS by writing a script in Visual Basic -- a simple, common programming language for Windows-based machines -- that tricks the system into thinking the votes haven't been changed. GEMS runs on the Windows operating system.

The trick was uncovered by Herbert Thompson, director of security technology at Security Innovation and a teacher of computer security at the Florida Institute of Technology. Thompson has authored several nonfiction books on computer security and co-authored a new novel about hacking electronic voting systems called The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency...

More Diebold E-Voting Vulnerabilities: At Slashdot Politics, pointing to the Wired story above,

...it looks like Diebold has more to worry about now that it is possible to change votes with a 5 line VB script. 'The vulnerabilities involve the Global Election Management System, or GEMS, software that runs on a county's server and tallies votes after they come in from Diebold touch-screen and optical-scan machines in polling places.'"

This is followed by hundreds of comments from the programmers who call this site home.

Electronic-Vote Critics Urge Changes to System: Reuters,

...While it is too late to fix such flaws, officials should ensure that they have a paper backup of vote counts on every level, Harris and other activists said.

Officials should print up paper ballots rather than relying on touch-screen systems, and print out vote totals in each precinct and deliver them by hand to make sure centralized vote-counting computers are working properly, they said.

Congress has authority to force local officials to improve their procedures if they are reluctant to do so, they said.

But it has so far shown little interest in voting security, and bills that would require touch-screen systems to print out votes have failed to make it out of the committee level.

E-voting critics report new flaws: News.com covers the demonstration and adds,

Also on Wednesday, the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation released a kind of election guide for geeks. Complete with photographs of the most popular models of e-voting machines, it lists their known flaws and problems that people have had with them in the past.

More background: VerifiedVoting.org.
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Seen in the East Bay:

It's outside a veterinary clinic.
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Cuba: Pictures from the Revolution: Last night we watched this beautifully photographed Discovery Channel documentary about Cuban-American photographer Roberto Salas, who in turn documented Fidel Castro for more than 40 years. It was on the Discovery Times cable channel, a collaboration of Discovery Network and The New York Times.

There's a video clip of the film here, 1:58 in high- and low-bandwidth Real Video.

Here are the times this will be shown again. On our local Cox Cable, DTimes is Channel 102.
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Cat Stevens? Yusuf Islam, CatStevens.com.

British F.M. Rejects U.S. Reason For Deporting Cat Stevens: AFP,

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has complained to his US counterpart Colin Powell about the deportation from the United States of former pop star Cat Stevens as a possible terrorist risk, a report said Wednesday.

Straw, in New York for United Nations meetings, had spoken to Secretary of State Powell about the imminent removal of the British musician, his spokesman was quoted as saying by Britain's domestic Press Association (PA) news agency.

"He (Straw) heard the reports of the incident involving Cat Stevens," the spokesman was cited as saying by PA. "He did say to the Secretary of State that this action should not have been taken". ...

ABC reports,

Islam has made a number of trips to the United States in recent years, including one in May for a charity event and to promote a DVD of his 1976 MajiKat tour. He donated half the royalties from his most recent boxed set to the Sept. 11 Fund to help victims of the attacks.

His 21-year-old daughter, Maymanah,with whom he was traveling, was allowed to enter the U.S.
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Foolish geek tricks: Geekpress suggests the photo of the 1954 RAND model of the 2004 computer, blogged here yesterday, is a hoax:

Update on the "Home Computer" picture: The photograph is apparently a Photoshopped hoax. Reader Mike Jaeger pointed out,

That is the control panel from an old naval nuclear reactor. On the far right is the EPCP (electric plant control panel) where the electrical operator on watch ("EO") controls power flows and breaker positions (notice the schematic laid out with switches for breakers). In the middle section is where the reactor operator ("RO") sits. He shims the control rods up and down in the reactor core with the lever (the L shaped lever just in front of the horizontal bar) and on the left is the throttleman station (usually manned by electricians). The large wheel is used to open/close ahead steam valves to the propusion shaft, while the smaller wheel is used to open/close back steam (astern throttles). The two wheels would be used in conjunction with each other to get the shaft to stop from a forward rotation, and then go in reverse (ahead steam is removed and astern steam applied to stop the shaft). The different gauges are specific to each station, with the throttleman concerned about power to steam flow ratios, steam pressures, etc. The RO cares about primary water avg. (coolant) temp, pressures, etc. The EO is watching vital bus voltages, and charging the battery with a trickle charge.

Thought you may like to know that (I used to sit on the far right, but on a newer version of that same panel).

Thanks for the correction, Mike!

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September 21, 2004, 7:24 p.m. -- Last week's weblog

Questions from readers for the presidential candidates: Here is the first batch:

-- How are the American people safer now that Saddam Hussein is out of
power in Iraq?

-- I want to know where the candidates stand on outsourcing jobs. I also want to know what the candidates think about expanding the H-1B visa (for foreign tech workers) limit from 65K, and if they think that the L1 visas (intracompany transfers of foreign workers here) should have tighter restrictions on them.

-- How would most of the nations leaders feel about stopping all foreign aid until social security is solvent?

-- Regarding the economy - Bush's camp keeps telling us that it's improved but there are always huge layoffs cited in the news, the economy doesn't look that bright from that perspective. Also, being originally from the "Ocean State" Bush seems to consistently go against anything that has a direct impact on the environment, siding with big industry - shipping lanes in fishing grounds, air quality issues, etc. - what legacy does this leave our children?

Although the paragraph above does not use the question format, the author seems to be asking, "What will you do about this?"

-- How are we going to be sure our votes are counted? Every election with touch-screen machines seems to "lose" votes that can never be recounted.

When we accumulate a few more, we'll try to get them to the campaigns. (Got a question? Please send your questions to lennon@projo.com with the subject "Questions." And please, no "gotcha" questions. The point is to make informed decisions.)
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Eddie Adams embraced life with a wide lens: Albuquerque Tribune reporter Stacia Spragg worked for Eddie Adams as a lighting assistant when she was in graduate school. Adams died Tuesday. Here's an excerpt:

Eddie's name is always attached to the phrase "Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer." He covered countless wars, world crises, children in need, famines and even celebrities in his later years for Parade Magazine.

But his life's work is often reduced to being the man who photographed the Viet Cong officer being shot point-blank in the head.

It was a gritty, horrible moment that, without argument, helped change the perspective of the American war in Vietnam.

Eddie hated that picture. He didn't like to talk about it; he didn't have it hanging in his New York home with all the other big glossy pictures from his life in photojournalism.

That was what war was, he would say. He was friends with the general who fired the gun. He felt pain that his photojournalism career was built on that one single frame that destroyed the reputation and life of the general.

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No master list of Library Lookups: Jon Udell, who wrote the LibraryLookup generator, notes:

To those of you who wrote with updates to the static lists: thanks, but I can't continue to maintain them. They were a useful bootstrap, and may still serve a purpose. But the generator is what I'm able to maintain. And it should give the most reliable results.

While he's right that his tool is the motherlode, working out the right URLs and editing the bookmark is above the competency level of many Web users who might want to use the tool to find books at the library that they see at an online bookseller's.

It would be helpful to them to find a list that includes their local library.

Which leads me to a musing on technology: When all the lip-flapping was going on about what the IBM selectirc typewriter could and couldn't do, the flexibility of the typewriter wasn't mentioned much.

Software makes the programmer the controller of function, but a good secretary could make a typewriter do almost anything.

Part of the technology was left to the operator.

Superscripts, subscripts? Manually move the roller.

Now, if the programmer didn't put a feature in, you're outta luck.

By the way, the LibraryLookup tool for Rhode Island now lives permanently on the right side of this page.

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HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey on eBay: HAL 9000 is the Cinerama 160 degree Fairchild-Curtis lens used to film the actual scenes from HAL's point of view for "2001". It also doubled as the prop, the eye of HAL 9000. HAL is one of the few artifacts left from the movie “2001”...

HAL -- a transposition of the letters in IBM, minus one -- has an opening bid of $150,000 and, so far, no takers.

Related: The online version of HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, at MIT press.

And, here's a photo of a model (?) created in 1954 by RAND scientists of what a "home computer" would look like in 2004. What are all the round dials doing? (May be a hoax, according to Geekpress)
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Pop art links: All come from Burp:

Worth 100: Fun with Propaganda 3. Photoshopping contest contestants modify the posters.

The Art of Peter Falk.

Joe Bravo's Acrylic Paintings on Tortillas ("The preparation of the tortilla for painting is as important as the actual painting itself. I first bake several tortillas to get the right texture, shape and coloration for the image I want to paint.")

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The fall equinox is Wednesday, 12:29 p.m. EDT. Religious Tolerance.org covers it:

The Fall Equinox is also known as: Alban Elfed, Autumn Equinox, Autumnal Equinox, Cornucopia, Feast of Avilon, Festival of Dionysus, Harvest Home, Harvest Tide, Mabon, Night of the Hunter, Second Harvest Festival, Wine Harvest, Witch's Thanksgiving, and the first day of autumn....

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Ann Rice describes her writing process. On her own site last month, the New Orleans author writes,

...My method of writing is to develop the novel sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph and page by page with heavy rewriting and reshaping and editing as I go along, a method thoroughly developed from the beginning, so that even in the earliest times, while working on an electric typewriter, my office was littered with rejected quarter pages and half pages, and three-quarter length pages until I had the perfected page in order to proceed to the next page.

You might say I was word processing before word processors. But the point is, I never worked in drafts. I never sat down and wrote a "first draft" of anything. I wrote only through slow and polished and highly edited evolution, discarding as I went along until --- by the very end -- I had a completed and polished and deeply thought out and, above all, deeply felt and executed manuscript. One version of that manuscript existed, and nothing more. There was never a sloppy first draft or second draft or third draft.

Now once I was accepted by a publishing house, and I began to make a living from my writing, I did fall into the situation where I would hand in partial manuscripts in order to receive part of an advance payment, but these were not first drafts -- they were versions -- which usually lacked the ending. My editor at that time would give me her comments -- what characters she responded to most, what puzzled her, what she thought was unclear and so forth -- and I would respond to those comments, very often with changes. But what was handed in was never a raw draft. I don't create such drafts. It's unthinkable for me. I can't proceed that way.

And though I am devoted to my editor, I always had mixed feelings about this process of receiving her comments and responding to them.

After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation. So all novels published after The Queen of the Damned were written by me in this pure fashion, my editor thereafter functioning as my mentor and guardian....

I have only read one Rice book, a 976-pager titled The Witching Hour. While we were in New Orleans in June, a friend pointed out her Garden District house, and I thought I'd check her out at last, after years of not crossing her literary path. Halfway through, I told my husband, "This lady needs an editor! This is all atmosphere but nothing much happens, although something is always about to."

There's a review of the book at Amazon that sums up my reaction perfectly. I could have written it, but I didn't:

Rice's motto: Any story worth telling is worth over-telling, May 24, 2002

Reviewer: Scott C. (Mesa, AZ USA)
Since I already spent countless hours slogging through this book, I will try to be succinct in my reasons for not recommending Witching Hour:

1. It is overtold. Remember those essays in high school that had to be at least 10 pages long? Witching Hour reads like the publisher gave Anne Rice a 1000 page assignment, and she kept padding and padding the story until she met it. Anne Rice's motto clearly seems to be: Any story worth telling is worth over-telling.
2. The characters cave. Without giving the ending away, the "heroes" suddenly give up, for no apparent reason. The anticipated confrontation and climax just never happen.
3. There is no ending. While I figured that there would be sequels, or at least related books in the Mayfair series, I was stunned when the book ended with really no resolution of the major conflicts at all. All the author does is set us up for the next installment. After 1000+ pages! (Actually, this is obviously why the heroes give up, so there can BE a sequel.)

Yes, Anne Rice has a fine writing style, but I don't have the energy, stamina, or interest to invest in another of her novels. Not if the payoff is like the one in Witching Hour.

Yes, I felt she had wasted my time. And then I found that this volume was just part one of a three-part series. I didn't go there, though. The whole tale was pretty lurid.

The reader does not always seek the level of immersion in each sentence that Rice describes in the excerpt at the top of this post.
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September 20, 2004, 7:30 p.m.

Garden Blogs updated: Native Plants Blog added.

Contest seeks photos of crumbling U.S. infrastructure:

The American Society of Civil Engineers is sponsoring a photo contest for images that illustrate America's overburdened and aging infrastructure, such as traffic congestion, flooding or damage. Photos should depict the condition of current infrastructure in the 15 categories that will be evaluated for the 2005 Report Card for America's Infrastructure. One winner in each of the 15 categories will be selected to receive a $100 cash prize. One image will be selected for the overall Grand Prize of $1,000.

The winning image in each category will be selected to appear on a special series of 15 "Postcards from the Edge." The postcards will be used to alert national and municipal leaders about ASCE's 2005 Report Card for America's Infrastructure and our national critical infrastructure needs, failures and improvements. The images may also be used as illustrations for the 2005 Report Card that will be released March 9, 2005....

The infrastructure categories are:

• Roads
• Bridges
• Transit
• Aviation
• Schools
• Drinking Water
• Wastewater
• Dams
• Solid Waste
• Navigable Waterways
• Hazardous Waste
• Energy

New categories for 2005

• Rail
• Parks and Recreation
• Security

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To defeat Al Qaeda, US must build trust of moderate Muslims: By Daniel Yankelovich(founder, with former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, of Public Agenda) in the Christian Science Monitor:

...When it comes to winning over Muslim moderates who now sympathize with the militants, the US starts with a huge disadvantage - a rising tide of mistrust of its policies and intentions. According to a Gallup Poll of nine Muslim countries, only about 1 out of 10 Muslims believes that Americans respect Islamic values, and even fewer - 7 percent - feel that the West understands Muslim customs and culture. The majority of Muslims polled by the Pew Global Attitudes Project also believes that the US is a military threat to them. Other surveys show that the Iraq war has exacerbated Muslim resentment.

Unfortunately, America's non-Muslim allies have also come to mistrust it. Majorities in most Western European countries polled by EOS Gallup Europe now consider the US a threat to world peace....

John Kerry's speech on Iraq at NYU today: Transcript • video at C-Span

President Bush speaks at the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday morning at 10:30 and the topic is expected to be Iraq, of course.

Related: Oil. Profits. Iraq. Cheney. Energy task force: My Canadian correspondent Eric Lilius send along this link from the Toronto Star, where the author is a columnist.

Crude dudes: `U.S. oil companies just happened to have billions of dollars they wanted to invest in undeveloped oil reserves. Adapted from It's The Crude, Dude: War Big Oil, And The Fight For The Planet, by Linda McQuaig, 2004. Published by Doubleday Canada.

The publisher's blurb begins,

Michael Moore rakes America’s corporate villains over the coals. Noam Chomsky flays the United States for the hypocrisy of its global adventurism. Now comes Linda McQuaig, whose incendiary new book tells us how the world’s most powerful industry and history’s most lethal army are having their way with the planet....

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Blogger counters NYC subway preachers with show tunes: Koaloha, the author of the Ladies Village Improvement Society just couldn't take it any more.
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For someone who has nearly everything: Christmas is coming.

For someone awful who sleeps alone, there's The Godfather Horse Head Pillow
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Google picks Gates' brains: Is Google building a browser? NY Post eyes recent hires, and wonders.
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Washing Machine Reads Smart Tags on Clothing, Sends Emails: The appliance from hell, at Gizmodo. It sends the email "when your load of laundry is complete." In case you didn't hear the buzzer go off?
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Women's eNews Special Report on Welfare: Here's how Women's eNews describes it:

This six-part special report, featuring illustrations by Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes and photographer Amani Willett, details for the first time the outcomes of the 1996 welfare law through the viewpoint of single mothers.

Moms Without a Net: Raising Children Alone in the Post-Welfare Era, published Sept. 9, seems to be an entry point. The stories are in reverse chronological order, so you might read from the bottom. The seventh, top story is a commentary by Margy Waller, a visiting fellow at The Brookings Institution and former senior advisor for Welfare and Working Families to President Clinton.

The stories in the Welfare Series:

Welfare Series: Time for Congress to Act
Run Date: 09/14/04

Welfare Series: Belva Elliott, Mother of Five, Speaks
Run Date: 09/02/04

Welfare Series: Block Grants Starve State Budgets
Run Date: 09/03/04

Welfare Series: Services for Abused Women Scarce
Run Date: 08/27/04

Welfare Series: Child Support Cash Kept by States
Run Date: 08/22/04

Welfare Series: Child Care Promises Fall Through
Run Date: 08/13/04

Welfare Series: Law Drops Moms in Deeper Poverty
Run Date: 08/06/04

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12:25 p.m.
Tweaked again: See a book on Amazon, reserve it at your library: One more tweak of the PPL bookmarklet: Now, if you're on a bookseller's page with an ISBN number and click the bookmarklet, the window that opens on the statewide Providence Public Library catalog search has your browser's top menu items on it..

I had to keep filling in my library card number with each book I wanted to request, so I added the browser's top menu to the window that opens on the library catalog. This let me use the form manager to save it. Now I can fill in the form without looking up my library card number each time.

(If you've already dragged Saturday's version to your toolbar, either delete it and drag the new one, or, if you're comfortable editing your bookmarks, edit this one to add "menubar=1," after "location=1," -- leave no spaces.)

In case you just got here, here's what the bookmarklet does:

-- Drag this link -- PPL -- to your personal link toolbar (the one with Home, Bookmarks, etc.).
-- Click it when you're at the page of a book that interests you at Amazon.com and other online booksellers, and it will open a separate window to the book's page at the Providence Public Library.
-- Here you can see whether it's on the shelf, you can log in and request it, or just add it to your personal list of books you want to read sometime.

Here's an example of what will happen if you click that bookmarklet while you're at on a book's page at an online retailer.

For the background on this, check out Saturday's blog item. And thanks again to Jon Udell for the original, tweakable code of the LibraryLookup project.

Trackback: Lost Remote TV weblog calls this trick "wonderful."

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