It’s official: 62% of polled believe that Rumsfeld has lost his mojo. Next thing you know, he’ll be going back in time to recover it. I could rehash the oft-stated comment that the line between real news and The Onion is getting fuzzy. In fact, there’s something even more interesting going on here. Real news […]
My friend Dan says to me today “I can’t help but feel that the cell phone industry has failed humanity. They don’t even have the right intentions.” I can’t help but agree with Dan. At a mall this weekend, a customer argues with a sales person: “they give you a discount on the phone if […]
A couple of years ago, IBM had fantastic TV ads about online business and the power of the network: a large Japanese company looking for a supplier finds a one-person small business in the US, all the while thinking they’re dealing with a huge corporation because their interface is the Internet. It was cute, it […]
Aaron has an optimistic piece about political marketing. He thinks most people are liberals, and if only liberals changed their political image, they’d win elections. I wish I could agree. I wish a simple Madison Avenue rebranding campaign could make Democrats more palatable. We’re entering an era of increased conservatism by some and dangerous radicalism […]
Though the overall result of the California Recall is undisputed, some questions are surfacing concerning the use of Diebold touch-screen voting machines due to some incredibly fishy results. Apparently, Diebold refuses to allow auditing of their voting machines or the setup of an alternative paper trail of votes to allow for recounts. This means that […]
A Princeton student was threatened with a lawsuit because he discovered and published information about how to circumvent a music CD’s copy-protection scheme by pressing the “shift” key. I was going to rant about the sad direction we are taking with this kind of approach, about how we must protect researchers’ freedom to tell the […]
Wendy Seltzer points out that Verisign will provide absentee voting technology. Who’s going to audit this technology? Will it be open-source so that anyone can audit it? In a previous post, I mentioned that current expert thinking on Internet Voting is mostly apocalyptic: we just don’t have the technology or social awareness to operate internet […]