Security quotes of the week [LWN.net]

If Microsoft's "reputation" database can't tell the difference between a gambling site and an independently audited registered nonprofit public-interest charity founded almost 30 years ago, it is certainly doing you and your business more harm than good.

-- The Free Software Foundation is unimpressed at being tagged as a gambling site

Amazingly, Accenture, which sold its crap-on-a-stick high-school sophomoric completely insecure malfunctioning voter registration software to a bunch of states, so unsuccessfully that Colorado refused to pay and others, like Wisconsin and Shelby County, bought out the source code in order to try to bandaid it into a functional system, has decided to issue a DMCA protective order against Black Box Voting for exposing its flawed software.

Last time a voting system company did a DMCA takedown notice (Diebold, in 2004) it got socked with punitive charges for abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, trying to use it to block distribution of material clearly published in the public interest.

-- Bev Harris gets a DMCA takedown request (the entire thread is interesting)

The firm gathers publicly available voter files from all 50 states and supplements this with records of political donations and other profiles purchased from commercial data brokers, says CEO Jeff Dittus. Then, working with about 100 high-traffic websites that register their users, they can match the offline data to the online identities of individuals.

Few Web surfers realize how widely data about them gets bought, sold, and combined. But the practice is common. In a recent investigation, ProPublica revealed that Microsoft and Yahoo each offer political campaigns the ability to target voters in similar ways.

-- Jessica Leber in Technology Review

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Security quotes of the week

Posted Jun 28, 2012 16:04 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]

Interesting thread is right. Holy smokes batman.

Note that one of the service items reveals that it was tripling votes for "random" voters in the 2004 primary. Files I have obtained show that it doubled or tripled votes in the 2008 primary, and also in the May 2010 and Aug 2010 primaries in Tennessee. However: It is not random. It only appears to be random when voters are sorted by fields other than precinct/voter ID. In fact, it is doubling and tripling recorded votes in white Republican suburbs.