Once you leave the polling place, an intricate dance of technology takes place. Perhaps the machine you used creates a local tally and prints out an end-of-day receipt, which is later added to tallies from other machines in that precinct, in that county, and that state. The counts themselves must [Keep reading]
The worst mistake you can make is not voting. The second-worst is … accidentally voting for the wrong person. So read those voters pamphlets, and news stories about HOW you’ll be voting, and be prepared! Still, there are other ways your vote can be screwed with on election day. For [Keep reading]
Step 2: Voter registration Let’s say you press on past digital propaganda and decide you are going to vote. You register. That data has to live somewhere. And it has to remain accurate. If a group wanted to engage in voter suppression, they could hack state registration databases and remove [Keep reading]
Yes, every vote counts. But will your vote be properly counted next week? Or will hackers mess with our election (again?)? Also, voting seems so simple; Bush or Gore, yes or no…why is it so hard to get this right? These are essential questions, central questions at the heart of [Keep reading]
Today, we’ll begin with Step 1: Long before you step into the voting both, your vote can be hacked. It’s already happened. I’ve written about state-sponsored trolling before, and I think it might be the greatest threat to democracy, and maybe even intelligence itself. Here’s a partial transcript from this part [Keep reading]
Twitter alerted an undetermined number of users on Thursday that it had inadvertently — but temporarily — revealed their location data, even though they had directly requested that such information be deleted. I know because I was one of those users. I received the above notice as a pop-up at [Keep reading]
You’ve been hacked, and now you have a mess to clean up. Maybe an imposter rampaged through your bank accounts, so you have to make dozens of calls. Maybe you have to play email tag with huge firms like Facebook or Google to reclaim your accounts. You probably have to [Keep reading]
I decided to fulfill a dream this year on my birthday and spend a week biking on Missouri’s Katy Trail. I’d gone to graduate school in Columbia, near the center of the trail — the first rails-to-train-project in America — when the Katy opened. It’s 250 miles long, allowing bikers [Keep reading]
(Previous post) The trail begins just outside St. Louis, and the city of St. Charles is a fine place to start. Very cute, right along the river, plenty of shops and places to get lunch. But I’d done that before, and I wanted to see new things. [Keep reading]
(Previous post) Missouri’s capitol city, Jefferson City, is about 30 miles south of Columbia. I’d never been there, so I took that as my real first ride on the trail. The newness excited me. The sub-30 degree morning did not. But I’d read about a cool pedestrian bridge over the [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan