Today in California, Arnold Shwartzenegger (hereafter called “The Governator” due to my complete inability to spell “Shwartzenegger”) signed a bill into law requiring existing voting systems to be retrofitted to provide a paper trail by the time the 2006 primaries roll around.  It also prohibits any new paper-less systems from being certified after Jan 1st of 2005, and prohibits the state from purchasing any paper-less electronic voting machines after 2006. California's Attorney-General still intends to sue the pants off Diebold for fraud, contending that Diebold made false claims about their product, which were not properly tested or approved prior to their use in recent...

I made a quick bugfix for FirstOnScene tonight.  I realized that if a new-style Scheduled Task was marked “hidden”, I wasn't going to find it. This is now fixed in version 1.3.1 of FirstOnScene, which can still be downloaded via this link. As always, bug reports and all forms of feedback are greatly appreciated.

(For previous entries regarding the looming disaster that is electronic voting, please see this post and also this post) If our ignorant (I'm being nice by not suggesting “corrupt“) state governments continue to fly headlong down this ill-advised and reckless path of electronic voting, it will no longer be a question of *if* an election will be hacked, but *when*. Let me bring you up to date, since a number of very serious issues have come to light in the past few weeks: Security experts recently discovered that the Diebold system (by far the most popular in the country) could be attacked at the...

While the worldwide press plays up terrorism's increasingly-desperate efforts as we approach US and Iraqi elections, people like Arthur Chrenkoff continue to quietly compile and report good news from Iraq.

My DNS changed over the weekend.  I didn't notice it until today though, when I went to check the site from work.  I had a busy weekend, and didn't have time to babysit the network like I normally do. Anyway, it's back up now.  Enjoy.

My friend Steve tossed me a GMail invite, and I decided to join the crowd.  For about 2 years now I've been leeching off a QWest email account that they forgot to cancel after a failed ISDN installation.  When they tried to bill me $400 for a span I was never able to push a single packet over, I figured they had it coming. So please note my email address has changed to beau(dot)monday(at)gmail(dot)com.  I hope all my Nigerian friends get this message, I'm waiting patiently for my money to arrive as we agreed.

You know, the closer we get to this election, the more brazen the main stream media has become in its efforts to put their man Kerry into the White House.  They have apparently abandoned all efforts to even appear impartial. Take for instance, this recent episode of an AP reporter flat making up a story about Bush supporters booing when the President expressed his well wishes to former president Clinton.  The reporter snidely remarked that “thousands booed“ and “Bush did nothing to stop them.“  You can see a screenshot of AP's original story here.  Newspapers and other media outlets immediately picked...

So while I was humping books up and down the stairs last weekend as a result of moving my office from upstairs to downstairs, I decided it was past time to try out what my friend Paula swears by:  Selling used books on Amazon. So I went through every technical book I had, took out a select few that I couldn't bear to part with, and listed the rest on Amazon.  I put up about 60 books all told.  If it was selling for more than 3 bucks on the used market, I listed it. Here it is, 5 days later, and...

I was re-reading last night's “Of Bush And Kerry” post this morning, and thought to myself:  “Damn, that was pretty half-hearted.” And I was right.  (Right today, half-hearted last night.  Keep up.) The problem was, during the course of that post, and the one before it, I had consumed, shall we say, a non-trivial quantity of Fat Tire, a substance that I have a certain fondness for.  The first post, about my office project, took a while to write.  And I was wearing out the carpet between the office and the kegerator the entire time (the Fat Tire even made a cameo appearance in one...

Some interesting security gatherings coming up in the next month or two: Secure World Expo (Oct 26-27, Seattle):  2 Days of focused 45-minute talks, including keynotes from CISO-types from some of our most innovative local companies (Starbucks and WaMu), for $145. Can't beat that. West Coast Security Forum 2004 (Nov 22, Vancouver BC):  It's a one-day event, but again bargain-priced at 240 Canadian dollars. These are the kinds of events we need to see more often, everywhere.  Lots of short talks on specific subjects, and at prices nearly everyone can afford.  It doesn't have to be some travelling behemoth that you have to...

I spoke this morning at length with the detective who is in charge of the Kenmore child murder case, and we came to the conclusion that her case and mine are unrelated.  Her suspect (arraigned on murder charges yesterday, by the way) is African-American, and my guy was white (the majority of child abusers in the Seattle area are white males). I asked her how stiff penalties are for this kind of thing, and she said that the Kenmore suspect faces 25-27 years in prison if convicted.  Apparently there were signs of habitual abuse on the 3-month-old, and they are making...

My friend Anil sent me an IM the other day, asking me to post some details about my latest project, so here goes: As I have eluded to ever so subtly in a couple previous posts, I have been working hard towards converting the computers in my office into rack-mount models.  One of the primary reasons is that I have somewhere around a dozen systems at the moment (most of them are used for my security research projects, only 4 are static), and my simple 7-foot telco rack wasn't cutting it (yes, that rack).  I was also looking to cut down on...

You may remember 2 weeks ago I mentioned that I had the opportunity to catch a child beater, but lost him on 405.  I was in the Kenmore area when I gave up the chase, having lost the vehicle in the growing darkness. The following Sunday (last Sunday), a 3-month old child was rushed to Children's Hospital after paramedics responded to his home and discovered he was not breathing.  The child died 4 days later, and the father was immediately arrested for child abuse.  The child's 17-month old brother is in state protective custody. They lived in Kenmore. It would mean a lot to me if anyone familiar with...

I spent the day relocating my home office downstairs (mostly motivated out of my reluctance to muscle my new computer enclosure up the stairs, honestly).  I also migrated my ISA firewall to a rack-mount chassis while it was powered off and not looking. So all this took the site down for a few hours while I got things wired back up.  Hopefully things will return to normal now (relatively speaking).

Nothing demonstrates the need for a business continuity plan quite like a bomb threat in the building next door. It was an interesting afternoon.