December 5, 2024

ES&S Uses Undergraduate Project to Lobby New York Legislature on Risky Voting Machines

The New York State Legislature is considering a bill that would ban all-in-one voting machines. That is, voting machines that can both print votes on a ballot and scan and count votes from a ballot – all in the same paper path. This is an important safeguard because such machines, if they are hacked by […]

“Signal Loss” and advertising privacy on Facebook

The 2021 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology, a major award administered by a Japanese foundation, goes to Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, a Chinese computer scientist who earned PhDs from Harvard and the University of Illinois before being a professor at MIT, Stanford, and Princeton and then becoming Dean of an important theoretical computer science education program […]

Could quantum computers be cost-effective by 2036?

In theory, quantum computers could be much more efficient at some kinds of tasks, which could be potentially disruptive in applications areas such as cryptography. But you know: in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they are not. So it’s interesting to find applications where quantum computing might possibly be useful […]

Another 2020 lawsuit over internet voting

Last week I summarized 4 lawsuits filed in 2020 over internet voting, in VA, NJ, NY, NH. Then I learned there was another in North Carolina. In 2020 the North Carolina Council of the Blind sued the State Board of Elections, demanding that the Board offer “alternative format absentee ballots allowing private and independent method […]

Four 2020 lawsuits over internet voting

Citizens with disabilities (and voters living abroad) must have the substantive right to vote—that’s the law.  Sometimes that turns into a demand for internet voting.  But as I wrote earlier this year, internet voting is dangerously insecure, it’s not what most voters with disabilities want, and there are much better ways of accommodating voters with disabilities, […]