I know that Google’s technology is all-powerful, but it sure as hell is baffled by this particular blog. Here is one of the ads it placed on the right-hand side in response to several recent posts about the deteriorating quagmire in Iraq!
Daily Archives: November 3, 2006
United States Patent Application: 0040161257
Hmm…. Here’s an impressive patent application for “Display control apparatus for image forming apparatus.” Among the claims it seeks to register is this:
9. The method of providing user interface displays in an image forming apparatus which is really a bogus claim included amongst real claims, and which should be removed before filing; wherein the claim is included to determine if the inventor actually read the claims and the inventor should instruct the attorneys to remove the claim.
Er, is it just possible — as GMSV suggests — that this is a spoof application that “seeks to prove once and for all that the USPTO is run by a gang of tambourine-playing monkeys with a big rubber ‘approved’ stamp”? Surely not.
The key to votes
From Ed Felten’s Blog…
The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.
On Wednesday we did a live demo for our Princeton Computer Science colleagues of the vote-stealing software described in our paper and video. Afterward, Chris Tengi, a technical staff member, asked to look at the key that came with the voting machine. He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key, and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in his key and sure enough it opened the voting machine.
This seemed like a freakish coincidence — until we learned how common these keys are.
Chris’s key was left over from a previous job, maybe fifteen years ago. He said the key had opened either a file cabinet or the access panel on an old VAX computer. A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. It’s a standard part, and like most standard parts it’s easily purchased on the Internet. We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop — they open the voting machine too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.
Using such a standard key doesn’t provide much security, but it does allow Diebold to assert that their design uses a lock and key. Experts will recognize the same problem in Diebold’s use of encryption — they can say they use encryption, but they use it in a way that neutralizes its security benefits.
The bad guys don’t care whether you use encryption; they care whether they can read and modify your data. They don’t care whether your door has a lock on it; they care whether they can get it open. The checkbox approach to security works in press releases, but it doesn’t work in the field.
Update (Oct. 28): Several people have asked whether this entry is a joke. Unfortunately, it is not a joke.
It turns out that the same key opens the Nedap/Groenendaal e-voting machines that the Dutch government has decided are unsafe for the forthcoming November 22 general election! Truly, you could not make this stuff up.
How many times can you sell your soul?
Mitch Ratcliffe on the Novell-Microsoft deal…
The announcement that Novell and Microsoft will work together to improve interoperability between Windows and Novell’s SuSE Linux, as well as cross-promote and support one another’s products strikes me as eerily like one of those movies with Christopher Lee as Dracula.
Every time you see an old Dracula film, the same fool is making a deal with Drac to achieve eternal life, a life you know, as the viewer, is going to be awful and short. “Don’t do it!” you want to shout at the screen, and so it is with this deal between the maker of Windows and the acquirer, as Novell once staked its future on UNIX, of SuSE Linux.
I’m not saying Microsoft is evil, only that it makes these interoperability deals to defeat its partner, not help them. In the 90s, when both Windows and Novell Netware were under assault by IP networks, they tried to co-exist. Microsoft started making Netware-compatible versions of its local area network management and operating system software.
[…]
Linux may win someday, but Novell looks like it will be found dead one morning with mysterious bite marks on its neck. But we can see that now, because we’ve seen this movie before.
William Styron
Eric Homberger has written a nice obituary of William Styron. I loved this description of how and where he wrote:
Styron wrote his books in longhand using a No2 pencil on yellow lined paper. A good day’s work might see him complete two or three pages of manuscript. A quotation from Flaubert was displayed in his study: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work”.
I see now where I went wrong. I’ve been trying to avoid becoming bourgeois all my life. Sigh.
The Boston Globe obit adds something else about his craftsmanship:
Mr. Styron wrote in longhand on yellow legal pads, striving for 500 words a day. He preferred to write just one draft of a book, getting each page just right before proceeding to the next, rather than revising a completed draft. His own harshest critic, Mr. Styron had a self-described “neurotic need to be perfect each paragraph — each sentence, even — as I go along.”