March 29, 2024

ExpressVote XL “fix” doesn’t fix anything

Five years ago I described a serious security flaw in the design of all-in-one voting machines made by two competing manufacturers, ES&S and Dominion. These all-in-one machines work like this: the voter indicates choices on a touchscreen; then a printer prints the votes onto a paper ballot; the voter has a chance to review the […]

CITP Comments on AI Accountability

Recently, the White House opened a number of opportunities for the public to comment on the growing field of accountability for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the Executive Branch agency that is principally responsible for advising the President on telecommunications and information policy issues, launched a comment process that […]

States Sending Data to TikTok from Government Websites Despite Concerns

By Yash Parikh and Mihir Kshirsagar While some states like Montana are trying to ban data collection by TikTok, other states like Missouri are actively – and perhaps, unknowingly – sending their citizen’s data to TikTok. Yash Parikh, a Princeton computer science student, conducted research that reveals that at least one Missouri government website – covidvaccine.mo.gov […]

Can ChatGPT—and its successors—go from cool to tool?

Anyone reading Freedom to Tinker has seen examples of ChatGPT doing cool things.  One of my favorites is its amazing answer to this prompt: “write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.”   Based in part on this kind of […]

Unrecoverable Election Screwup in Williamson County TX

In the November 2020 election in Williamson County, Texas, flawed e-pollbook software resulted in voters inadvertently voting for candidates and questions not from their own districts but from others in the same county.  These voters were deprived of the opportunity to vote for candidates they were entitled to vote for—and their votes were wrongly counted […]