vote

E-voting hacks to get Capitol Hill spotlight

A recent report documenting computer scientists' ability to hack into voting machines certified for use in the state of California has already begun reverberating on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who happens to be one of the chief sponsors of a bill that would prohibit paperless voting machines by the 2010 federal elections, says she plans to hold a hearing in September on the report in the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which she leads. The politicians are expected to break for the summer at the end of this week.

In a statement Tuesday, Feinstein expressed dismay at &… Read more

Computer scientists hack Calif. e-voting machines

Forgive me if this isn't some major news flash, but let's document it for posterity anyway: University of California computer scientists have recently shown it's possible to carry out a bevy of hacks on electronic voting machines currently certified for use in the Golden State.

In reports released late last week, the researchers chronicle their five-week endeavor, at the request of California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, to exploit examine machines made by Hart InterCivic, Sequoia Voting Systems and Diebold. The same models are also in use in many other states, according to a database compiled by the Election Reform Information Project. … Read more

Top 10 apps from iPhoneDevCamp

Hundreds of Web developers, designers, and ordinary geeks gathered this weekend to build usable applications for Apple's iPhone. The barcamp.org event was hosted at Adobe Town Hall and featured dozens of sponsors. The hack-a-thon began on Saturday morning, and wrapped up late Sunday afternoon when each team had a chance to present its app.

Some teams included a group of Yahoo! developers, and others included complete strangers who had just met the day before. I give credit to all teams who participated, but here are the 10 most memorable creations:

10. iPhoneVote This application was the first one presented at the hack-a-thon, and it was used as a voting system for the event. You would tilt your iPhone in portrait mode to vote yay, and tilt it horizontally to give a negative vote. There was a laptop set up in the front of the room, and it was updated in real time. Unfortunately, I don't think the app reset each time a new team would present, so the votes just tallied up into the 80s. Even though it wasn't used for its official purpose, it was a great burst of hope for future apps like this, and boosted the morale of the developers in the room.

9. AppMarks If you have an iPhone, make AppMarks your Safari home page. The interface models the iPhone front door, but instead, each icon links to a Web app or HTML bookmark. I mentioned AppMarks in this blog post a few days ago. AppMarks is cool, but I want to see more functionality. If the AppMarks people want users to add AppMarks as their home page, they need to always be thinking of new features. There are other products, like Mojits, that are right on their heels.

8. PickleView The only sports application presented was called PickleView. Ryan Christianson from the Walt Disney Internet Group explained that in baseball, a pickle is a play in which a base runner is trapped between bases with fielders tossing the ball back and forth and usually ending with the runner being tagged out. Most will remember it well from the 1990s classic,The Sandlot.

Their iPhone app visualizes a box-score view of your favorite teams’s stats, and then displays a mock Twitter feed of PickleView's friends. I am not sure if that's how this app works, but the developers have a cool concept.… Read more

Contest click-athon 2.0: Tapatap

A little while ago I wrote up Nintendo's "Everybody Votes" channel, a small Wii application that lets users pit themselves against the masses in a multiple-choice voting system. One of the things it did so brilliantly was let you see how your answers stacked up against others after the polls had closed. Along similar lines comes Tapatap, a new contest service that lets you go up against others in contests that use an "A-or-B"-style voting system.

Each contest has a theme, and the most popular ones are listed on the contests page. The site … Read more

MySpace gets political

MySpace is set to launch a voting platform for the presidential primaries early next year, allowing MySpace users to submit a mock vote for their favorite candidate. While the results won't actually count as real votes for election into office, candidates will no doubt try to win the coveted title of MySpace's people's choice winner. There's already a list up on MySpace's Impact page, where 11 of the candidates have thumbnail links to their MySpace profiles.

MySpace has more than 100 million registered users, with around 230,000 new ones each day. The prospect of … Read more

Spotplex: a selective Digg

Spotplex is an interesting take on social-voting sites. If you're familiar with Digg's system of user voting for story promotion, you'll notice that Spotplex takes a slightly different approach, counting click-throughs per link to promote stories to the front page. For blogs or Web site owners, submitting stories is automatic if you add a piece of code to your site. Spotplex then crawls and adds your content to the list of upcoming stories.

Spotplex has an arguably better system for site owners to add stories and to keep track of how popular a story is without using … Read more

Nintendo's new Wii channel brings social democracy to your living room

I got a press release about Nintendo's new social democracy channel this morning, but not before I had already noticed it while checking the Wii's weather channel between bites of cereal (yeah I'm that guy). The new channel--called "Everybody Votes"--is a simple yes-or-no voting system with a gorgeous interface. It might be the most colorful and well-designed Wii channel yet.

Everybody Votes allows Wii users to vote on simple questions. It also allows you to suggest your own poll to be featured on the service. The entire voting process is done using your self-created … Read more

Wii's new Everybody Votes channel: I don't know why, either

Dear Nintendo: you've had a great couple of months. The Wii is awesome, the DS still sells out everywhere, and everyone is pumped about your upcoming games (except maybe Wii Play). It's totally cool if you just want to take a break for a while, recharge your batteries and come back refreshed. You're starting to run out of ideas, and it shows.

Last night, Nintendo launched the Everybody Votes channel on the Wii. It's a polling/survey system that lets Wii users log in and answer various, seemingly random questions. They vote by dragging their Mii … Read more

YouTube adds Reddit-like features on Super Bowl minisite

YouTube's Super Bowl ads page is looking mighty fancy this year. They've created a new voting platform called Supervote. If anything, it's looking a little bit like Reddit with hot or not voting that moves each ad up or down based on user votes.

The page was set up as completely separate from the actual viewing gallery.

What interests me about this is whether or not this might become a permanent fixture on YouTube. There's already a star system for voting on YouTube videos, but having user-chosen list on the front page of YouTube as a … Read more

Buzzvote: Polling widgets for your blog

Buzzvote is a free polling service that lets users create and share their own polls. Once made, users can share their polls through a variety of social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Digg and Furl. You can also embed the poll in any Web page or blog. There are other services that do this, including BlogPoll and Pollpub, but Buzzvote has a really simple and easy-to-use interface.

After registering (which doesn't require your e-mail address), Buzzvote will keep track of all the items you've voted on, as well as show you current results for each. What it'… Read more