Give the Justice Department the Excuse of the Month award, for the reason its chief for information requests cited when rejecting a Freedom of Information Act request for its database on foreign lobbyists: copying the information would crash the department's computer system. "Implementing such a request," said Thomas McIntyre, "risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating." Open government advocates like the Center for Public Integrity snorted at that one. "This was a new one on us," said CPI's Bob Williams. "We weren't aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them." Depends on how old the system is, perhaps…
Give Microsoft Internet Explorer a thumbs-down? That's about what the Department of Homeland Security has done. The department's Computer Emergency Readiness Team has recommended IE users consider other browsers – Netscape, Mozilla, Opera – unaffected by last week's attack from Scob, a worm exploiting IE flaws by ay of IE surfers browsing still-unnamed popular Websites where malicious code was embedded. The CERT also recommends IE users set browser security settings to high and disabling Java function for the time being. (In a related story, Slate columnist Paul Boutin suggests this attack and other factors means Mozilla beats IE… and browser wars could be back soon.)…
Give electronic voting a not-so-fast. CNET News said June 30 that if you put it to a referendum now, it would probably lose. And you can blame security and verifiability for that, the tech news site said. "The fight is being waged around the world – in legislative chambers and state agencies, on newspaper editorial pages and over the Internet – as voting rights advocates and computer scientists hash out the technology's merits and risks in an increasingly polarized debate," CNET said, trumpeting a debate they set up between two supporters and two opponents of e-voting. "The harms are not potential, they are real," said one opponent, VerifiedVoting.org founder David Dill. "I do not discount the possibility that in isolated instances, someone might tamper with a machine and reset it to its original state before being discovered. There is no systematic, undiscoverable way to do this, however," said Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Michael Shamos, an e-voting supporter…
It looks like not so fast for trying a former Newfields (New Hampshire) Elementary School principal, Barry Ring, on child porn possession charges. The trial has been delayed to October. Ring quit his post in December, months after authorities claimed to have found child porn images on a laptop computer the school district issued to him. And it's definitely not so fast for a Maryville, Kansas babysitter convicted of advertising child porn online – Gerald Wallace Gordon is going to federal prison without parole for fifteen years, after pleading guilty in January to publishing an online notice offering to show, distribute, and reproduce child porn…
Multnomah County, Oregon has a kind of novel idea going: Internet filters with age limits in public libraries. The county is mulling a mandate for filtering for children 13 years old and under. New county library head Molly Raphael is pushing a plan to filter Net searches for such children unless a parent or guardian gives them permission otherwise. "We don't think federal officials should be deciding how libraries are run," she told the Oregonian. "But we also want to assure parents and guardians that we're mindful of the issue."…
If you've been mindful of bringing your family and social photos to pharmacy chain CVS for developing, you're about to get the chance to have a CVS Internet photo service. The chain says they are unwrapping a new service through which you can post digital images you want to print on the CVS Website and pick up quality prints at a CVS store the next day. CVS is hoping this will cut out delivery fees and thus make the service stand out. A number of film makers, including granddaddy Eastman Kodak, are beginning to look into cutting back on traditional printing and accelerating digital print options as well.
