Some eBay sellers frustrated with rule changes (AP)
<p>AP - Some people who sell things on eBay are fed up with new rules the company has been imposing in hopes of making the auction site more attractive to online shoppers. Now even more changes are coming in the next few weeks, but this time eBay Inc. hopes it can cool tempers.

American launches in-flight Internet on 3 routes (AP)

AP - One of the few remaining Internet-free havens vanished Wednesday as American Airlines launched airborne e-mail, Web and other online services on some of its longer, nonstop flights.

Review: 2 new devices mix learning with games (AP)

<a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080820/ap_on_hi_te/tec_tech_test_didj_leapster2">AP - Your kids can learn math, how to tell time and other skills needed for school — and you don't have to pry them away from video games.

Intel, Yahoo partnering on Internet TV concept (AP)
AP - Hoping to plant their flags on the screens of Internet-connected television sets, Intel Corp. and Yahoo Inc. unveiled a new project Wednesday to populate those screens with tiny programs called widgets.

FTC all but bans robocalls (CNET)
CNET - WASHINGTON--The Federal Trade Commission essentially banned robocalls Tuesday--creating new rules that telemarketers may only send the prerecorded sales pitches to people who actually want to receive them.

Intel and Yahoo Partner for Internet on TV (PC World)
PC World -

Palm Intros Windows Mobile-Based Treo Pro Smartphone (NewsFactor)

</a>NewsFactor - Struggling device-maker Palm Inc. introduced its new Windows Mobile-based, touch-screen Treo Pro Wednesday. The business-targeted smartphone will be released in Europe and Australia, although an unlocked version will be available directly from Palm in the United States and Asia Pacific, as well as in some parts of Europe.

Google Invites Security Researchers to Debug Android (NewsFactor)

NewsFactor - In a move that could help it avoid an iPhone 3G-like software drama, Google wants bug hunters to test its Android mobile platform. On Monday, the Android Security Team posted a message to introduce itself to the security research and vulnerability communities.</p>

Microsoft, Novell expand alliance with $100M deal (AP)

AP - Microsoft Corp., expanding on an alliance with Novell Inc., has agreed to buy as much as $100 million more for subscription certificates for Novell's Linux products, Novell said Wednesday.

Apple Reportedly Plans Another Fix for the iPhone (NewsFactor)

</a>NewsFactor - The Apple rumor mill is churning, but this week it's about software fixes instead of new products. News reports are raising expectations of yet another iPhone software fix in September.

JavaFX looks to stake claim in RIA (InfoWorld)
InfoWorld - With its new JavaFX technology for rich Internet applications, Sun Microsystems hopes to leverage the strength of the Java development base and Java's ubiquitous presence on devices to make a strong run in a race in which it is a very late entrant.

EA shifts tactics in bid to buy Take-Two Interactive (AFP)

AFP - US videogame giant Electronic Arts (EA) confirmed Wednesday it shifted from a hostile bid for "Grand Theft Auto" maker Take-Two Interactive to friendly talks about its two-billion-dollar offer.

How do you compare security across voting systems?
It&#8217;s a curious problem: how do you compare two completely unrelated voting systems and say that one is more or less secure than the other?  How can you meaningfully compare the security of paper ballots tabulated by optical scan systems with DRE systems (with or without VVPAT attachments)? There’s a clear disconnect on this issue.  It [...]

Is the New York Times a Confused Company?
Over lunch I did something old-fashioned—I picked up and read a print copy of the New York Times. I was startled to find, on the front of the business section, a large, colorfully decorated feature headlined “Is Google a Media Company?” The graphic accompanying the story shows a newspaper masthead titled “Google Today,” followed by [...]

Comcast Gets Slapped, But the FCC Wisely Leaves its Options Open
The FCC&#8217;s recent Comcast action—whose full text is unavailable as yet, though it was described in a press release and statements from each comissioner—is a lesson in the importance of technological literacy for policymaking. The five commissioners’ views, as reflected in their statements, are strongly correlated to the degree of understanding of the fact pattern [...]

iPhone Apps Show Industry the Benefits of Openness
Today’s New York Times reports on the impact of Apple’s decision to allow third-party application software on the iPhone: In the first 10 days after Apple opened its App Store for the iPhone, consumers downloaded more than 25 million applications, ranging from games like Super Monkey Ball to tools like New York City subway maps. It [...]

Where are the Technologists on the EAC Advisory Board?
Barbara Simons, an accomplished computer scientist and e-voting expert, was recently appointed to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Board of Advisors. (The EAC is the U.S. Federal body responsible for voting technology standards, among other things.) This is good news. The board has thirty-seven members, of which four positions are allocated for “members representing [...]

License for an open-source voting system?
Back when we were putting together the grant proposal for ACCURATE, one of the questions that we asked ourselves, and which the NSF people asked us as well, was whether we would produce a &#8220;bright shiny object,” which is to say whether or not we would produce a functional voting machine that could ostensibly be [...]

Plenty of Blame to Go Around in Yahoo Music Shutdown
People have been heaping blame on Yahoo after it announced plans to shut down its Yahoo Music Store DRM servers on September 30. The practical effect of the shutdown is to make music purchased at the store unusable after a while. Though savvy customers tended to avoid buying music in forms [...]

What’s the Cyber in Cyber-Security?
Recently Barack Obama gave a speech on security, focusing on nuclear, biological, and infotech threats. It was a good, thoughtful speech, but I couldn’t help noticing how, in his discussion of the infotech threats, he promised to appoint a “National Cyber Advisor” to give the president advice about infotech threats. It’s now [...]

The Decline of Localist Broadcasting Policies
Public policy, in the U.S. at least, has favored localism in broadcasting: programming on TV and radio stations is supposed to be aimed, at least in part, at the local community. Two recent events call this policy into question. The first event is the debut of the Pandora application on the iPhone. Pandora [...]

Transit Card Maker Sues Dutch University to Block Paper
NXP, which makes the Mifare transit cards used in several countries, has sued Radboud University Nijmegen (in the Netherlands), to block publication of a research paper, “A Practical Attack on the MIFARE Classic,” that is scheduled for publication at the ESORICS security conference in October. The new paper reportedly shows fatal security flaws in [...]

Could Too Much Transparency Lead to Sunburn?
On Tuesday, the Houston Chronicle published a story about the salaries of local government employees. Headlined “Understaffing costs Houston taxpayers $150 million in overtime,” it was in many respects a typical piece of local “enterprise” journalism, where reporters go out and dig up information that the public might not already be aware is newsworthy. The [...]

Viacom, YouTube, and the Dangerous Assembly of Facts
On July 2nd, Viacom’s lawsuit against Google’s YouTube unit saw a significant ruling, potentially troubling for user privacy. Viacom asked for, and judge Louis L. Stanton ordered Google to turn over, the logs of each viewing of all videos in the YouTube database, showing the username and IP address of the user who was viewing [...]

Vendor misinformation in the e-voting world
Last week, I testified before the Texas House Committee on Elections (you can read my testimony).  I’ve done this many times before, but I figured this time would be different.  This time, I was armed with the research from the California “Top to Bottom” reports and the Ohio EVEREST reports.  I was part of the [...]

Newspapers’ Problem: Trouble Targeting Ads
Richard Posner has written a characteristically thoughtful blog entry about the uncertain future of newspapers. He renders widespread journalistic concern about the unwieldy character of newspapers into the crisp economic language of “bundling”: Bundling is efficient if the cost to the consumer of the bundled products that he doesn’t want is less than the cost saving [...]

The End of Theory? Not Likely
An essay in the new Wired, &#8220;The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” argues that we won’t need scientific theories any more, now that we have so much stored information and such great tools for analyzing it. Wired has never been the best source for accurate technology information, [...]

Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law
James Grimmelmann has an interesting new essay, “Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law,” on the challenges of ensuring that the public has effective knowledge of the laws. This might sound like an easy problem, but Grimmelmann combines history and explanation to show why it can be difficult. The law — which [...]

New bill advances open data, but could be better for reuse
Senators Obama, Coburn, McCain, and Carper have introduced the Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008 (S. 3077), which would modify their 2006 transparency act. That first bill created USASpending.gov, a searchable web site of government outlays. USASpending.gov—which was based on software developed by OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation—allows end users [...]

Study Shows DMCA Takedowns Based on Inconclusive Evidence
A new study by Michael Piatek, Yoshi Kohno and Arvind Krishnamurthy at the University of Washington shows that copyright owners’ representatives sometimes send DMCA takedown notices where there is no infringement — and even to printers and other devices that don’t download any music or movies. The authors of the study received more than [...]

NJ Election Day: Voting Machine Status
Today is primary election day in New Jersey, for all races except U.S. President. (The presidential primary was Feb. 5.) Here’s a roundup of the voting-machine-related issues. First, Union County found that Sequoia voting machines had difficulty reporting results for a candidate named Carlos Cedeño, reportedly because it couldn’t handle the n-with-tilde character in [...]

Government Data and the Invisible Hand
David Robinson, Harlan Yu, Bill Zeller, and I have a new paper about how to use infotech to make government more transparent. We make specific suggestions, some of them counter-intuitive, about how to make this happen. The final version of our paper will appear in the Fall issue of the Yale Journal [...]