InfoTech & Public Policy

Professor Felten asked for some feedback about the class so I wanted to make my last post about a topic that was not covered. We covered a wide range of topics in this course, but one of the ones left out was electronic voting. I’m not exactly sure how it ranks with respect to the other topics, but just like the other, it is currently a very hot issue.

I tried to figure out what would be a good reading list for a discussion about electronic voting and quickly became overwhelmed with the amount that was out there. I think it could be a very interesting discussion since there are a number of recently passed and pending legislation in this area. Some focus strictly on paper voting records for electronic voting machines but others are much broader.

The Black Box Voting website keeps an up-to-date collection of news events regarding electronic voting issues. The corresponding book gives a pretty good overview of some of the issues and PDF files of the chapters are available for free download. The book was published in 2004, so is a bit out of date. Chapter 2 and the appendix contain a listing of e-voting problems throughout the country. It is a bit scary to read about all of those machine problems and I think Chapter 2 would be a good read for the class (it’s a very easy 22 pages)

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

Verified Voting is another good website for e-voting. It keeps track of the legislation (in all stages) regarding e-voting.

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/

NJ has a e-voting bill that requires a permanent paper record that can be verified and kept for audits (by 2008). Most states have new legislation with various requirements with regards to e-voting machines. There are also a variety of federal e-voting laws that are in Congress. The class should read the current NJ bill (which is very short) and some of the federal legislation.

One of the more aggressive paper verified e-voting bills, H.R.550, the “Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005″ was introduced by Rep. Rush Holt (the House representative for Princeton) Maybe he could even come to speak about the bill (in a class specific session or a more general setting). It would also be a nice touch to schedule this week in November if this class is offered during the fall semester.

I’m not sure if this would combine too many issues, but this topic could be done right after the week on copyright and the class could do a reading about Diebold and DMCA takedown notices. In 2003, Diebold, one of the larger e-voting machine manufactures, was sending DMCA notices of copyright violation to website posting Diebold corporate documents. The documents suggested that the company knew about security problems with the machines before they were sold. Diebold was asserting that the documents had copyright and the posting of that material was in violation.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation also has a large collection of e-voting documents. http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/

Great engineer that I am, it turns out that I’ve been clicking “save and continue editing” over the last few weeks instead of clicking publish. Consequently, my entries have been sitting useless as drafts. I will be posting them all shortly.

Thanks for your patience.

I have created a Wiki site to coordinate the last phase of drafting our FCC comment. The Wiki site has links to the latest unified draft of our FCC comment, as well as a space for any of you to post comments or suggestions. Please read and comment.

Next week we’ll discuss virtual worlds. There are three readings.

Julian Dibbell’s The Unreal Estate Boom is an introduction to the scope of virtual worlds and their economies.

James Grimmelmann’s Virtual Worlds as Comparative Law discusses several law/policy issues that arise in virtual worlds.

Ted Castranova’s The Right to Play argues for maintaining a separation between virtual worlds and the real world.

You might find it interesting to try out a virtual world. An interesting one is Second Life, which offers free memberships.

Welcome to the non-student guests who are joining us here.

Feel free to post (constructive and civil) comments on any student post. I hope we have an open and vigorous discussion, and I welcome respectful debate. But my goal as a teacher must be to serve the students enrolled in the course, so I reserve the right to block comments or commenters if I decide they are detracting from the students’ experience.

You’re welcome to participate in this course vicariously by doing the same weekly reading as the students and joining in a weekly discussion thread about the reading material.

Next week’s topic is competition policy. We’re reading two papers: Competition Policy in the Information Economy by Carl Shapiro, and Pro-Innovation Competition Policy: Microsoft and Beyond by Timothy Bresnahan. The open discussion thread on these papers will open on Tuesday morning. (Class meets on Tuesday evening.)

Students in the course are welcome to join the weekly discussion thread if they want, but this is not required and will have no effect on course grades.

You’ll soon start receiving feedback on the essays you have submitted so far. Essays are graded on a four-point scale. 1 is a weak essay. 2 means it’s fine but doesn’t stand out. 3 means it’s good. 4 means it’s very good indeed — this will be rare.

Along with each score, I’ll give you brief commentary. It will have to be brief because there are quite a few of you and I don’t have a teaching assistant to help with the grading. I’m happy to discuss the essays further with anyone who asks.

Has anyone else noticed that of all the people that are using their real full names on the blog (or at least what appear to be real names), all but one are male, while most of the women have chosen to use pseudonyms?

I’m not surprised, just curious what the reason is. A friend recently complained to me that I was revealing too much personal information on my website (specifically my undergrad transcript - yes you can all go look if you’d like, and there’s a good explanation for those 2 C’s!). I realized that at least right now, that just wasn’t something I considered too sensitive compared to the benefit of potential employers having easy access to it.

Maybe someone else would be interested in posting on how we individually draw the line between private/sensitive and public information. So far a few things come to mind… maybe: 1) some of us haven’t been burned badly enough yet to guard more of our information. 2) More of the scary stalkers are guys so girls are rightfully more cautious. 3) some of us want to be google-famous — if a google search of my name isn’t interesting enough, I just haven’t lived! (from someone who will probably never go bungee jumping if given the choice.)

[note - see previous post if you want my actual essay for this week. It’s just that its my birthday today so I want to feel special and double post! And I wanted to give away more secrets by telling you all it’s my birthday.]