“Dr. Strangevote saves mankind with Luddite voting recipe”

I’m usually an all-out pro-technology guy, but I agree with this completely: no e-voting until it’s provably (and checkably!) secure against fraud. There are too many people who would see the ends (the election of their chosen candidates) as justifying the means (tampering with the voting system) — you’ve got to make it as hard …

Continue reading ‘“Dr. Strangevote saves mankind with Luddite voting recipe”’ »

“Cybercrooks get faster, further and sneakier”

Although interesting (to me) in and of itself, I’m mentioning this article because of this bit from the last paragraph: In other developments, spammers have abandoned the use of image-based spam, file attachment spam and other such frippery by going back to basics. Nine in ten spam messages now contain little more beyond a few …

Continue reading ‘“Cybercrooks get faster, further and sneakier”’ »

“Exploit code targets Mac OS X, iTunes, Java, Winzip…”

Lovely. Okay developers, time to get moving — add public-key code-signing stuff, so that your programs can tell whether they’re getting a legitimate update or not. Don’t know how, and don’t have time to learn? Try the GnuPG Made Easy (GPGME) library. I’m happy to say that Ubuntu Linux isn’t affected by this, because it …

Continue reading ‘“Exploit code targets Mac OS X, iTunes, Java, Winzip…”’ »

Impatiently waiting for computer repair guy…

I’m on the phone now to Dell, trying to find out about the technician who’s supposed to be here today. Dell’s website is useless; I received an e-mail giving me explicit instructions for getting a status update from it, but when I jump through all the hoops, all it says is “Error retrieving results. Please …

Continue reading ‘Impatiently waiting for computer repair guy…’ »