An Incredibly Insecure Voting Machine →

A couple of the most famous people in computer security have stated that voting machines will never be as reliable as paper (even given as many problems and inefficiencies as paper ballots have). I'm optimistic, but when I see these companies almost completely ignoring security, it makes me wonder:

It's the AVS WinVote touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE). The Virginia Information Technology Agency (VITA) investigated the machine, and found that you could hack this machine from across the street with a smart phone:...

It's Not the 1 Percent Controlling Politics. It's the 0.01 Percent. →

This is the kind of thing that worries me: for the past few decades, money has been flowing from the average American to the very tippy-top of the ultra-rich, at the same time that laws have been [re-]written to allow them more control over political campaigns...

Even before presidential candidates started lining up billionaires to kick-start their campaigns, it was clear that the 2016 election could be the biggest big-money election yet. This chart from the political data shop Crowdpac illustrates where we may be headed: Between 1980 and 2012, the share of federal campaign contributions coming from the very, very biggest political spenders—the top 0.01 percent of donors—nearly tripled:...

If we believe in the "marketplace of ideas" that democracy is supposed to represent, we need to change the way political campaigns are financed.

Claims about embryos →

Tyler Cowen, analyzing recent arguments surrounding the news that Chinese scientists have genetically modified an embryo:

The better arguments are surely the slippery slope worries that embryo tinkering will change the nature and future of humanity in dangerous ways, perhaps producing too much conformity, too much zero-sum competition (“buy the Harvard splice”), too much discrimination against various “types,” too much induced family loyalty, legal discouragement of rebellious genes, excess advantages for elites, too many decisions which too explicitly lower the social status of some groups of people, and perhaps ultimately too much drift from the world we know (and love?).

Former Egyptian president Mursi jailed for 20 years →

Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Mursi was sentenced to 20 years in prison without parole on Tuesday on charges arising from the killing of protesters, nearly three years after he became Egypt's first freely elected president.
Mursi stood in a cage in court as judge Ahmed Sabry Youssef read out the ruling against him and 12 other Brotherhood members, including senior figures Mohamed el-Beltagy and Essam el-Erian. The sentencing was broadcast live on state television.
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The ruling is the first against Mursi, who says he is determined to reverse what he calls a military coup against him in 2013 staged by then-army chief, now president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Pseudoscience in the Witness Box: The FBI faked an entire field of forensic science. →

The Washington Post published a story so horrifying this weekend that it would stop your breath: “The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.”
...The shameful, horrifying errors were uncovered in a massive, three-year review by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project. Following revelations published in recent years, the two groups are helping the government with the country’slargest ever post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
Chillingly, as the Post continues, “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.” Of these defendants, 14 have already been executed or died in prison.
...
This study was launched after the Post reported that flawed forensic hair matchesmight have led to possibly hundreds of wrongful convictions for rape, murder, and other violent crimes, dating back at least to the 1970s. In 90 percent of the cases reviewed so far, forensic examiners evidently made statements beyond the bounds of proper science. There were no scientifically accepted standards for forensic testing, yet FBI experts routinely and almost unvaryingly testified, according to the Post, “to the near-certainty of ‘matches’ of crime-scene hairs to defendants, backing their claims by citing incomplete or misleading statistics drawn from their case work.”

Inside the Hellscape Where Our Computers Go to Die →

Some of them end up in a place like Agbogbloshie, a vast, poisonous dump in Ghana. A former wetland turned slum, the kilometer-long stretch of land is a toxic graveyard of computers, refrigerators and other trash. German photographer Kevin McElvaney documents the young people who pick through the piles, risking their lives in exchange for the meager sums they earn harvesting copper and other valuables.
Located in the city of Accra, Agbogbloshie is known by locals as Sodom and Gomorrah for its hellish conditions and blackened ground that resembles an open sore. The scavengers, typically between 7 and 25, sift through the refuse, setting fire to piles of rubbish to remove the rubber and plastic concealing the more valuable materials within...
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Despite the growing awareness of sites like Agbogbloshie, e-waste doesn’t seem to be slowing. According to United Nations University, the world discarded some 46 million tons of electronic gadgetry last year. Less than one-sixth was properly recycled or reused. It’s only going to get worse. Global e-waste is expected to 55.1 million tons in 2018.
China and the United States produce the most waste—32 percent of the global total last year—and some of that stuff is landing in Agbogbloshie. Jim Puckett, executive director of the Basel Action Network, a watchdog group that monitors e-waste, says he saw computers stamped with American government logos when he visited the site in 2012. Some probably were re-used but others were discarded.

Spoofing in an Algorithmic Ecosystem →

A London trader recently chargedwith price manipulation appears to have been using a strategy designed to trigger high-frequency trading algorithms. Whether he used an algorithm himself is beside the point: he made money because the market is dominated by computer programs responding rapidly to incoming market data, and he understood the basic logic of their structure.
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What is strange about this case is the fact that spoofing of this kind is, to quote one market observer, as common as oxygen. It is frequently used and defended against within the high frequency trading community. So why was Sarao singled out for prosecution? I suspect that it was because his was a relatively small account, using a simple and fairly transparent strategy. Larger firms that combine multiple strategies with continually evolving algorithms will not display so clear a signature. 

Texas Sends Poor Teens To Adult Jail For Skipping School →

The overwhelming majority of students charged are poor, and most are black or Hispanic. Students are not sentenced to jail for missing school outright but rather for failing to follow court orders associated with their truancy charges. Many students have found themselves in a teen version of debtors’ prison, locked up because their families did not or could not pay steep fines stemming from their original truancy charge. Moreover, there is evidence that some Texas judges are flouting a law intended to prevent young people from being jailed because their families can’t afford the fines.
Though Texas’ truancy system was intended to keep kids in school and headed toward graduation, it often has the opposite effect, driving many teenagers out of school. Days behind bars can count as unexcused absences if students don’t clear them with school officials by providing documentation from the jail. And even when they are not penalized for time in jail, it often means more missed school, rendering already-struggling students that much further behind.