Vista On Its First BirthdayVista On Its First Birthday

Yesterday was Super Tuesday, perhaps the most critical day for the

February 6, 2008

13 Min Read


InformationWeek Daily - Wednesday, Feb 6, 2008 Internet Voting: Bad Idea Or Good Idea? Yesterday was Super Tuesday, perhaps the most critical day for the presidential election until the general elections this fall. And some voters abroad had the option to cast their ballot online. That's online, as in over the Internet. Are we really ready for this? If you are a Democrat overseas, you could have gone to VoteFromAbroad.org, where you had the option to download a PDF ballot to fax or mail in, or you could have voted online. That just gives me the heebe geebees. It simply seems too easy to tamper with electronic information to trust electronic voting without a paper trail, let alone remote, Internet-based electronic ballots. Although the traffic is encrypted to the voting Web site, all it takes is a number of insecure notebooks or desktops to infiltrate the system. Virus and worm writers have had no trouble crafting malware designed to pilfer usernames and passwords to access financial systems, so how difficult would it be to tinker with electronic votes? And the argument that we conduct financial transactions online, so we can also vote online, doesn't hold much water for me. While I'm comfortable managing credit cards and financial accounts online because the banks and credit card companies reduce the consumer's culpability to $50 in most cases, there's no such insurance for an election gone bad. What would happen if an election was compromised, and there was no way to prove who actually won? The only thing we'd have to recount, with Internet voting, would be the bits -- not paper -- and bits are just too easily altered, or destroyed, to trust with democracy. Read the rest of my blog post and let me know whether you think Internet voting is a good idea or a bad idea by posting a comment. George Hulme [email protected] www.informationweek.com "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." -- John Kenneth Galbraith Assessing Windows Vista On Its First Anniversary In its first year, Micrsoft's highly touted operating system has had a rocky start as users have struggled to get a grip on applications compatibility, usability, and performance issues. IBM To Open Two More Offshore Development Centers In India Yet IBM isn't immune from a talent war that has raised questions about skill levels of employed engineers in India. Facebook Site Prompts Sexual Assault Charges At College A male student at Lewis & Clark College has been suspended after a group rallies around a site devoted to exposing his alleged attack on a female sophomore. Media And Tech Companies Overconfident About Security, Survey Finds Still, 49% of those queried said they're falling behind on security threats and only 7% believed their security situation was improving. MIT, TI Researchers Design Ultra-Low Voltage Chip Chips using the new design might be able to run off ambient energy, such as body heat or body movement, MIT said. High Tech E-Voting Problems Plague Super Tuesday Precincts from some of the 24 states voting in the presidential primary Tuesday are reporting performance issues with their electronic tally machines. Opera Upgrades Mobile Web Browser Opera Mobile 9.5 uses Opera's zoom technology to enlarge content on a Web page. Microsoft Gets Gartner's Business Intelligence Top Ranking The company makes a surprise leap ahead of Business Objects and Cognos in its ability to execute on BI products and pricing. Rhapsody Takes Over Yahoo's On-Demand Music Yahoo's change in music offerings comes as Microsoft tries to acquire the company for $44.6 billion. 'Pi For President' Campaign Is Launched A Web site aimed at mathematicians and computer geeks is running pi, with its infinite and endless series of digits, for president. Flaws Found In ActiveX Controls Used By Facebook, MySpace US-CERT also issued similar warnings for Yahoo's MediaGrid ActiveX control and the Datagrid ActiveX control. Nvidia Buys Gaming Software, Hardware Maker Ageia Nvidia plans to use Ageia products in conjunction with CUDA to build programs that offload work from a computer's general-purpose CPU to a separate graphics-processing unit. Windows Vista SP1 Release Delayed By Driver Troubles Microsoft has yet to finish ensuring that Windows Vista SP1 will work properly with keyboards, printers, mice, and other peripheral devices. All Our Latest News See InformationWeek's daily breaking news on your mobile device, visit wap.informationweek.com and sign up for daily SMS notifications. Assessing Windows Vista On Its First Anniversary IBM To Open Two More Offshore Development Centers In India Facebook Site Prompts Sexual Assault Charges At College Media And Tech Companies Overconfident About Security, Survey Finds MIT, TI Researchers Design Ultra-Low Voltage Chip High Tech E-Voting Problems Plague Super Tuesday Is Green Technology A Priority At Your Organization? Green technology can save energy, reduce costs in the long term, and conserve resources. But it requires an investment in changing infrastructure, and some people are skeptical that the green movement is politically motivated. Is green technology a priority at your organization? Visit the InformationWeek Forum to join the discussion. Keep Up With InformationWeek On Facebook Join the InformationWeek group on Facebook to keep up with the latest headlines and events and connect with the best people on the Internet -- your fellow InformationWeek readers. Virtualization At The Desktop? Examine how more than 250 companies plan to adopt server virtualization technology in this recent InformationWeek Research report, Server Virtualization. The BI Explosion Examine the business intelligence strategies of 500 companies, including deployment drivers and challenges, spending plans, and vendor selection, in this recent InformationWeek Research report. Liquid Computing Board Ousts CEO Hurley Brian Hurley, co-founder of "fabric computing" vendor Liquid Computing and, until a few days ago, its CEO, has been shown the exit. In his place steps Greg McElheran from investor Axis Capital. The abrupt change hasn't been publicly announced. Fear And Voting -- Online Let me knock down two tired reasons why just about none of us will be able to vote online today, Super Tuesday, or at any time during the 2008 presidential primaries or general election. Gartner Shakes Open Source's 8 Ball In a press release dated Jan. 31, research firm Gartner made a number of predictions about the IT marketplace in two to four years. One of the eye-openers: By 2012, they claim, "80% of all commercial software will include elements of open source technology." Wacky? Exaggerated? Probably not. Learn About SOA And Virtualization Later Today At InformationWeek Live Join us at 3 p.m. Eastern time today when we'll be talking with my colleague, senior editor Andy Dornan, about virtualization and service-oriented architecture at the official launch of InformationWeek Live. Apple Updates iPhone And iPod Touch; People Start Complaining Apple just can't make anyone happy any more. Forget the idea that the Mac Faithful might be all excited that Apple just doubled the storage capacity of its iPhone and iPod Touch -- albeit for an extra $100. Instead of cheering, user forums are full of whiny moaners who think Apple is out to screw them. Here's What The Google Phone Could Look Like Speculation about how the GPhone is shaping up has taken a temporary back seat to the chatter about Google's efforts to throw a monkey wrench into Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. But what developers are doing with the Android SDK, released last fall to inspire the flowering of a thousand independent Google Phones, is actually much more interesting. Now there's some stuff to look at, too. Internet Voting: Bad Or Good Idea? It's Super Tuesday, perhaps the most critical day for the presidential election until the general elections this fall. And some voters abroad will have the option to cast their ballot online. That's online, as in over the Internet. Are we really ready for this? Dell Says No Thanks To Notion Of Buying Motorola's Mobile Unit Dell CEO Michael Dell said that his company is "more focused on the computer business" and not so focused on mobile phones. In other words, Dell doesn't want to touch Motorola with a ten-foot pole. But who would be interested in Motorola? Full Nelson: Agito's FMC On TechWeb TV Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) is anything but fixed these days, although several pieces are coming together. Nokia has several dual mode handsets, for example. Carriers like T-Mobile and BT are rolling out new services. Most of the activity has been aimed at the consumer, and while that isn't an unlikely target, FMC promised to be a key component for the truly mobile enterprise worker. Agito Networks hopes to provide some answers on the infrastructure side. Source: Yahoo Talking To Google To Fend Off Microsoft According to a Reuters report, Yahoo said it would consider joining forces with Google in order to prevent Microsoft from acquiring it. What sort of partnership could it strike with Google that would hold Microsoft at bay while not triggering antitrust issues? Oh, and Yahoo says $31 per share isn't good enough. Dell Looks To iSCSI To Restore Former Luster The merger of Dell's manufacturing know-how and EqualLogic's innovation were supposed to result in all sorts of storage goodies when Dell acquired the company late last year. Now, if the combined assets could just fix the rest of what's ailing Dell. New Botnet Army On The March There's a new botnet (a network of malicious nodes, known as "bots") gaining strength, and it's successfully infiltrating U.S. companies by bypassing traditional antivirus products. NAC Best Practices: Three Simple Steps to Deploy Network Access Control You need network access control (NAC)—not just to ensure compliance of systems known to IT—but also to exclude unauthorized computers. Having an enterprise-level strategy for security compliance and access control is essential to protecting your organization from a broad spectrum of potential threats. Breaking the Bottleneck - Solving the Storage Challenges of Next Generation Data This paper takes a holistic view of the data center, discusses each of these components individually, and explains how the crucial element of Storage has lagged behind advancements in Compute Power and the Network. Data Center Transformation This white paper presented a disciplined approach to BOCA projects consisting of five phases: assess, plan, build, stabilize, and optimize. Featured Jobs: Mentor Graphics seeking Technical Marketing Engineer - DFM in San Jose, CA Verizon seeking Fiber Network Technician in Freehold, NJ Miami-Dade County seeking PeopleSoft Systems Administrator in Miami, FL Allen Partners seeking Program Manager in Seattle, WA Fulcrum Microsystems seeking Networking Software Engineer in Calabasas, CA For more great jobs, career-related news, features and services, please visit our "Career Center. Try InformationWeek's RSS Feed Discover all InformationWeek's sites and newsletters Recommend This Newsletter To A Friend Do you have friends or colleagues who might enjoy this newsletter? Please forward it to them and point out the subscription page. More than 20,000 IT terms, more than 20,000 definitions: All at your fingertips, all in TechEncyclopedia Saw a TechWeb feature you want to see again? You are subscribed as #emailaddr#. To unsubscribe from, subscribe to, or change your E-mail address for this newsletter, please visit the InformationWeek Subscription Center. Update your subscriber profile. Note: To change your E-mail address, please subscribe your new address and unsubscribe your old one. Keep Getting This Newsletter Don't let future editions of InformationWeek Daily go missing. Take a moment to add the newsletter's address to your anti-spam white list: [email protected] If you're not sure how to do that, ask your administrator or ISP. Or check your anti-spam utility's documentation. Thanks. We take your privacy very seriously. Please review our Privacy Policy. InformationWeek Daily Newsletter A free service of InformationWeek and the TechWeb Network. Copyright (c) 2008 CMP Media LLC

CMP Information Week InformationWeek Daily - Wednesday, Feb 6, 2008

Editor's Note

Internet Voting: Bad Idea Or Good Idea?
Yesterday was Super Tuesday, perhaps the most critical day for the presidential election until the general elections this fall. And some voters abroad had the option to cast their ballot online. That's online, as in over the Internet. Are we really ready for this? If you are a Democrat overseas, you could have gone to VoteFromAbroad.org, where you had the option to download a PDF ballot to fax or mail in, or you could have voted online. That just gives me the heebe geebees. It simply seems too easy to tamper with electronic information to trust electronic voting without a paper trail, let alone remote, Internet-based electronic ballots. Although the traffic is encrypted to the voting Web site, all it takes is a number of insecure notebooks or desktops to infiltrate the system. Virus and worm writers have had no trouble crafting malware designed to pilfer usernames and passwords to access financial systems, so how difficult would it be to tinker with electronic votes? And the argument that we conduct financial transactions online, so we can also vote online, doesn't hold much water for me. While I'm comfortable managing credit cards and financial accounts online because the banks and credit card companies reduce the consumer's culpability to $50 in most cases, there's no such insurance for an election gone bad. What would happen if an election was compromised, and there was no way to prove who actually won? The only thing we'd have to recount, with Internet voting, would be the bits -- not paper -- and bits are just too easily altered, or destroyed, to trust with democracy. Read the rest of my blog post and let me know whether you think Internet voting is a good idea or a bad idea by posting a comment. George Hulme
[email protected]
www.informationweek.com Quote of The Day "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." -- John Kenneth Galbraith Top Stories
Assessing Windows Vista On Its First Anniversary
In its first year, Micrsoft's highly touted operating system has had a rocky start as users have struggled to get a grip on applications compatibility, usability, and performance issues. White Paper
IBM To Open Two More Offshore Development Centers In India
Yet IBM isn't immune from a talent war that has raised questions about skill levels of employed engineers in India. Facebook Site Prompts Sexual Assault Charges At College
A male student at Lewis & Clark College has been suspended after a group rallies around a site devoted to exposing his alleged attack on a female sophomore. Media And Tech Companies Overconfident About Security, Survey Finds
Still, 49% of those queried said they're falling behind on security threats and only 7% believed their security situation was improving. MIT, TI Researchers Design Ultra-Low Voltage Chip
Chips using the new design might be able to run off ambient energy, such as body heat or body movement, MIT said. High Tech E-Voting Problems Plague Super Tuesday
Precincts from some of the 24 states voting in the presidential primary Tuesday are reporting performance issues with their electronic tally machines. Opera Upgrades Mobile Web Browser
Opera Mobile 9.5 uses Opera's zoom technology to enlarge content on a Web page. Microsoft Gets Gartner's Business Intelligence Top Ranking
The company makes a surprise leap ahead of Business Objects and Cognos in its ability to execute on BI products and pricing. Rhapsody Takes Over Yahoo's On-Demand Music
Yahoo's change in music offerings comes as Microsoft tries to acquire the company for $44.6 billion. 'Pi For President' Campaign Is Launched
A Web site aimed at mathematicians and computer geeks is running pi, with its infinite and endless series of digits, for president. Flaws Found In ActiveX Controls Used By Facebook, MySpace
US-CERT also issued similar warnings for Yahoo's MediaGrid ActiveX control and the Datagrid ActiveX control. Nvidia Buys Gaming Software, Hardware Maker Ageia
Nvidia plans to use Ageia products in conjunction with CUDA to build programs that offload work from a computer's general-purpose CPU to a separate graphics-processing unit. Windows Vista SP1 Release Delayed By Driver Troubles
Microsoft has yet to finish ensuring that Windows Vista SP1 will work properly with keyboards, printers, mice, and other peripheral devices. All Our Latest News On The Go
See InformationWeek's daily breaking news on your mobile device, visit wap.informationweek.com and sign up for daily SMS notifications. In This Issue
Assessing Windows Vista On Its First Anniversary IBM To Open Two More Offshore Development Centers In India Facebook Site Prompts Sexual Assault Charges At College Media And Tech Companies Overconfident About Security, Survey Finds MIT, TI Researchers Design Ultra-Low Voltage Chip High Tech E-Voting Problems Plague Super Tuesday
Community
Is Green Technology A Priority At Your Organization? Green technology can save energy, reduce costs in the long term, and conserve resources. But it requires an investment in changing infrastructure, and some people are skeptical that the green movement is politically motivated. Is green technology a priority at your organization? Visit the InformationWeek Forum to join the discussion. Keep Up With InformationWeek On Facebook
Join the InformationWeek group on Facebook to keep up with the latest headlines and events and connect with the best people on the Internet -- your fellow InformationWeek readers. The latest research, polls, and tools
Virtualization At The Desktop?
Examine how more than 250 companies plan to adopt server virtualization technology in this recent InformationWeek Research report, Server Virtualization.

The BI Explosion
Examine the business intelligence strategies of 500 companies, including deployment drivers and challenges, spending plans, and vendor selection, in this recent InformationWeek Research report. Latest InformationWeek Blog Posts
Liquid Computing Board Ousts CEO Hurley Brian Hurley, co-founder of "fabric computing" vendor Liquid Computing and, until a few days ago, its CEO, has been shown the exit. In his place steps Greg McElheran from investor Axis Capital. The abrupt change hasn't been publicly announced. Fear And Voting -- Online Let me knock down two tired reasons why just about none of us will be able to vote online today, Super Tuesday, or at any time during the 2008 presidential primaries or general election. Gartner Shakes Open Source's 8 Ball In a press release dated Jan. 31, research firm Gartner made a number of predictions about the IT marketplace in two to four years. One of the eye-openers: By 2012, they claim, "80% of all commercial software will include elements of open source technology." Wacky? Exaggerated? Probably not. Learn About SOA And Virtualization Later Today At InformationWeek Live Join us at 3 p.m. Eastern time today when we'll be talking with my colleague, senior editor Andy Dornan, about virtualization and service-oriented architecture at the official launch of InformationWeek Live.
Apple Updates iPhone And iPod Touch; People Start Complaining Apple just can't make anyone happy any more. Forget the idea that the Mac Faithful might be all excited that Apple just doubled the storage capacity of its iPhone and iPod Touch -- albeit for an extra $100. Instead of cheering, user forums are full of whiny moaners who think Apple is out to screw them. Here's What The Google Phone Could Look Like Speculation about how the GPhone is shaping up has taken a temporary back seat to the chatter about Google's efforts to throw a monkey wrench into Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. But what developers are doing with the Android SDK, released last fall to inspire the flowering of a thousand independent Google Phones, is actually much more interesting. Now there's some stuff to look at, too. Internet Voting: Bad Or Good Idea? It's Super Tuesday, perhaps the most critical day for the presidential election until the general elections this fall. And some voters abroad will have the option to cast their ballot online. That's online, as in over the Internet. Are we really ready for this? Dell Says No Thanks To Notion Of Buying Motorola's Mobile Unit Dell CEO Michael Dell said that his company is "more focused on the computer business" and not so focused on mobile phones. In other words, Dell doesn't want to touch Motorola with a ten-foot pole. But who would be interested in Motorola? Full Nelson: Agito's FMC On TechWeb TV Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) is anything but fixed these days, although several pieces are coming together. Nokia has several dual mode handsets, for example. Carriers like T-Mobile and BT are rolling out new services. Most of the activity has been aimed at the consumer, and while that isn't an unlikely target, FMC promised to be a key component for the truly mobile enterprise worker. Agito Networks hopes to provide some answers on the infrastructure side. Source: Yahoo Talking To Google To Fend Off Microsoft According to a Reuters report, Yahoo said it would consider joining forces with Google in order to prevent Microsoft from acquiring it. What sort of partnership could it strike with Google that would hold Microsoft at bay while not triggering antitrust issues? Oh, and Yahoo says $31 per share isn't good enough. Dell Looks To iSCSI To Restore Former Luster The merger of Dell's manufacturing know-how and EqualLogic's innovation were supposed to result in all sorts of storage goodies when Dell acquired the company late last year. Now, if the combined assets could just fix the rest of what's ailing Dell. New Botnet Army On The March There's a new botnet (a network of malicious nodes, known as "bots") gaining strength, and it's successfully infiltrating U.S. companies by bypassing traditional antivirus products. White Paper
NAC Best Practices: Three Simple Steps to Deploy Network Access Control
You need network access control (NAC)—not just to ensure compliance of systems known to IT—but also to exclude unauthorized computers. Having an enterprise-level strategy for security compliance and access control is essential to protecting your organization from a broad spectrum of potential threats. Breaking the Bottleneck - Solving the Storage Challenges of Next Generation Data
This paper takes a holistic view of the data center, discusses each of these components individually, and explains how the crucial element of Storage has lagged behind advancements in Compute Power and the Network. Data Center Transformation
This white paper presented a disciplined approach to BOCA projects consisting of five phases: assess, plan, build, stabilize, and optimize. Job Listings
Featured Jobs: Mentor Graphics seeking Technical Marketing Engineer - DFM in San Jose, CA Verizon seeking Fiber Network Technician in Freehold, NJ Miami-Dade County seeking PeopleSoft Systems Administrator in Miami, FL Allen Partners seeking Program Manager in Seattle, WA Fulcrum Microsystems seeking Networking Software Engineer in Calabasas, CA For more great jobs, career-related news, features and services, please visit our "Career Center. Get More Out Of InformationWeek
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