Technobabble

Vote Democrat, get Republican In my fortnightly ramble on technology and how it affects you, my North County neighbor, I like to bring together humorous tidbits of technology twaddle from the newswire to remind us how humorous living in the future really is. But this week is not so funny.

The technology news is saturated with stories on how your vote this last week in the primary election had a very likely chance of not being recorded in the way you intended. I love technology, but if these e-voting machines are not working, then give me a No. 2 pencil and a bubble form. I don’t get it. Isn’t the process of “one person, one vote” the cornerstone of our democracy? HBO aired a documentary last week called Hacking Democracy on perceived vulnerabilities in our computer-based electronic voting system. A new major report from the University of Connecticut outlines a plentiful amount of security flaws in Diebold’s optical-scan voting machines and the Miami Herald reported that “it’s not uncommon for [electronic voting machines’] screens … to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly.” If my controller for my xBox doesn’t work, I scrap it and get one that does work. I don’t keep playing my games, not getting the results I want. This is not rocket science.

Print Your Own Be careful if you want to help society by showing how easy it is to hack a system. Congressman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is calling for the arrest of security researcher Christopher Soghoian. Soghoian posted a Northwest Airlines boarding-pass generator to show just how easy it is to fabricate these documents. In response to Markey’s call for prosecution, Soghoian suggested that Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) also be arrested as he posted online detailed instructions for the exact same procedure in April. The authorities broke into Soghoian’s house one night, with a permit, while he was away, trashed his abode and took his computer.

100,000,000 Web sites If you can’t find it on the Web, it probably doesn’t exist. Our fingers, via the keyboard, enable our social networking, gaming, e-mail, shopping, research and, of course, porn consumption on this 17-year-old system. The Interweb or World Wide Internet, as the geeks like to call it, was invented in 1989, not by Al Gore, but by a dude in Switzerland who wanted to share high-energy particle physics data. With the drop in the cost of personal computers and the ease with which one can make a Web site on their own without knowing code, the number of Web sites has mushroomed. In 1995, Netcraft, a Bath, England-based company, recorded only 18,000 Web sites. According to Netcraft, the United States, Germany, China, South Korea and Japan show the greatest Web-site growth spurts. If you don’t have your own Web site and unique e-mail, do you really exist? As reported in an earlier column, even the Dalai Lama has his own Web site. Enter the matrix.