Screwed by Diebold

This is what happens when you choose a company focused more on profits than on security to design voting machines for public elections:

Love the Internet? Vote for Obama.

David Weinberger explains the fundamental difference between John McCain's technology policy and Barack Obama's. His conclusion:

The two candidates� visions of the Internet could not be clearer. We can have a national LAN* designed first and foremost to benefit business, and delivered to passive consumers for whom the Net is a type of cable TV. Or, we can have an Internet that is of the people, by the people, for the people.

Editor's note: a LAN is a "local area network," typically used within and controlled by a single company or other organization.

Evernote

I'm trying out Evernote, a hybrid desktop/online note taking product whose new and improved version just came out of beta testing. It seems like a good product, though I already have one significant gripe. One of the key features is that you can take a photo of something like a whiteboard or a page of notes and send it to Evernote, and the software will scan it for text, making it searchable. Very cool. Except that, while it becomes searchable, you never get direct access to the text, so there's no way to copy and paste, edit, etc. This is a key feature in most OCR software, and has been a feature of Microsoft's OneNote (which does much of what Evernote does, minus the killer synchronization between computers/web) for a long time. C'mon, Evernote, get with the program!

14 Questions for McCain & Obama

The group at Sciencedebate 2008 put together a set of 14 community-generated questions for McCain and Obama regarding their views on science and technology policy. As an Obama supporter, I'm planning to e-mail the Obama campaign to encourage it to respond publicly to these questions. I hope more people will do the same with their candidate of choice, or with both for those who are undecided.

Internet public health

Over on my Harvard blog, I�ve started a series of posts about my foray into the field of public health and how it relates to the malware world. If you�re interested, please read along and post your thoughts in the comments.

Daylight savings tricks

Another one of life's little "a-ha" moments: when you realize that the reason your Palm has been reminding you of things an hour late all week is because of the time change five days earlier.