Posts Tagged ‘Georgia’
“Troubles hurt the most when they prove self-inflicted”*…
Earlier this year, Georgia’s Secure, Accessible, and Fair Elections Commission held a public meeting at the state capitol to answer a pressing question: What should Georgia do to replace its aging, touchscreen voting machines, as well as other parts of its election system? In the preceding years, security vulnerabilities in the state’s election system had been repeatedly exposed: by Russian operatives, friendly hackers, and even a Georgia voter who, just days ahead of the 2018 midterms, revealed that anyone could go online and gain access to the state’s voter registration database.
Computer scientists and elections experts from around the country had weighed in during the seven months of the commission’s deliberations on the issue. They submitted letters and provided testimony, sharing the latest research and clarifying technical concepts tied to holding safe, reliable elections. Their contributions were underscored by commission member Wenke Lee, co-director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Information Security and Privacy, and the group’s only computer scientist.
Despite this, the commission ultimately did not recommend measures backed by Lee and his colleagues at places like Stanford, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Google — including the recommendation that the state return to a system of paper ballots filled out by hand, combined with what scientists call risk-limiting audits. Instead, the commission recommended buying a system that included another, more expensive touchscreen voting machine that prints a paper ballot. Months later, Lee was at a loss to explain: “I don’t understand why they still don’t understand,” he said.
With its decision, Georgia’s counties remain among the 33 percent of counties nationwide that use either machines with no paper trail or machines that print paper ballots, which are then scanned on separate machines. The vast majority of the rest of the counties use paper ballots filled out by hand, which are then scanned or counted by hand…
Georgia is one of many states that is adopting or considering voting technology that some experts say decreases security and election integrity: “Georgia’s New Election System Raises Old Computer Security Concerns.”
[Most of those voting systems run on Windows 7, a dated operating system that’s demonstrably vulnerable to hackers… and that reaches “end of life” in January.]
* Sophocles
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As we wonder why, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 that notices were tacked onto the doors of African-American churches in Fitzgerald, Georgia reading “The first n-gger who votes in Georgia will be a dead n-gger” [without the ellision].
Scoping scale…
On AndaBien, web designer Steve Rose pursues his extra-vocational enthusiasms… among them, evolution.
His Evolution Timeline is a marvelous evocation of the sheer temporal scale of our antecedents.
— From first life-forms to homo sapiens
* The background indicates inches and feet.
* 1/20th in. = roughly 100 thousand years. (108,000)
* 1 inch = about 2 million years. (2,160,000)
* 1 foot = about 26 million years. (25,920,000)
* The whole page is about 135 feet wide, almost half a football field, representing 3.5 billion years. (3,500,000,000)
The very beginning of the timeline (and of life on Earth)
So, be prepared to scroll… and scroll and scroll and scroll… And to learn. (By way of reinforcing one’s sense the extraordinary sweep of it all, readers might also appreciate Rose’s “Evolution, The Movie.”)
As we struggle with the recent revisions to the tree of life and the suggestion that humans are more closely related to fungus than to plants, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886 that Coca-Cola was first sold to the public at the soda fountain in Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia. It was formulated by pharmacist John Stith Pemberton, who mixed it in a 30-gallon brass kettle hung over a backyard fire. Pemberton’s recipe, which survived in use until 1905, was marketed as a “brain and nerve tonic,” and contained extracts of cocaine and (caffeine-rich) kola nut. The name, using two C’s from its ingredients, was suggested by his bookkeeper Frank Robinson, whose excellent penmanship provided the famous scripted “Coca-Cola” logo.
Are you sending a text, or are you just glad to see me?…
From Clusterflock, via the ever-illuminating Jason Kottke, “Meat Stylus for the iPhone“:
Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.
It seems that the sausages, electrostatically speaking, are close approximations of the human finger. Here’s the not-entirely-useful English translation of a Korean news article about the soaring sausage sales.
As we head directly for the refrigerated section of our grocery stores, we might recall that it was on this date in 1733 that James Oglethorpe founded that 13th of the original American Colonies– Georgia– and a settlement that has grown to become Savannah. February 12 is still observed as Georgia Day.
Oglethorpe’s idea was that British debtors should be released from prison and sent to the new colony. Ultimately, though, few debtors ended up in Georgia. Rather, colonists included many Scots and English tradesmen and artisans and religious refugees from Switzerland, France and Germany, as well as a number of Jewish refugees. The colony’s charter guaranteed the acceptance of all religions– except Roman Catholicism, a ban based on fears born of the colony’s proximity to the hostile settlements in Spanish Florida.
Oglethorpe also arranged that slavery should be banned by Georgia’s Royal Charter; and the colony was slavery-free through 1750 (after Oglethorpe’s departure back to England). At that point, the Crown acceded to land owners’ desire for a larger work force, and lifted the ban.
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