That is my jam!

Hot Tech Stories.

My tech stories of the day: electronic voting, college online applications, and RSS feeds.

1. The New York Times has an article about the security flaws in the Diebold AccuVote system, which has led the pack as an alternative to paper ballots. Turns out the key to its memory card is generic (the kind used for office furniture, minibars, etc.), and even if you don't have one of those keys you can pick the lock in 10 seconds...so one could swap it out with one that has code to alter the votes. And how were these flaws exposed? By the academic community. Diebold took the "we don't want to expose our system to scrutiny" stance and basically poo-pooed the notion that anyone in the political world would be shifty enough to physically tamper with the system (yeah right). In 2003 researchers found the code for the AccuVote system on one of Diebold's public servers, and the only reason for these latest pick-the-lock findings (plus code that will swing the votes toward a desired candidate) is that Princeton obtained an AccuVote system from a third party. So instead of going on the defense, as Diebold has done, why not work with academia to try to fix problems? I'm sure they'd be able to find a school or two that would jump at the chance to hack into this system, figure out its flaws, and come up with solutions for better security.

2. Wired is reporting on states helping kids and parents out in the college search. They ultimately want to provide information about the colleges and universities in their respective states and streamline the online application process so it takes less work to apply to multiple colleges. Some good stats from the article:

North Carolina's cfnc.org, which launched in 2000, has been credited with helping increase the state's college-enrollment rate from 57 percent to 68 percent of high school graduates.

North Carolina, which spends about $1 million a year to maintain its site, has 1.3 million students and families registered for accounts. After the first year, the site had just 14,000 registered.

Kentucky launched its "Go Higher Kentucky" campaign in 2000, part of which is gohigherky.com, the state's college website. Since then, the number of high school students going on to college has grown from 55 percent to 62 percent.

CSU now only prints 100,000 applications, compared with the several million before the website. Close to 98 percent of the 500,000 applications received are through the site, he said.

This mainly pertains to the state college system, but I think it's a good indication of how much of this process, from school applications to job applications, has migrated to the Internet. When one is filling out the same information over and over again in applications, it only makes sense to automate the process. I think that of the seven schools I applied to for undergrad six years ago, I applied electronically to the University of Richmond and Wake Forest. Wake Forest had to ask for a hard copy because they lost my electronic submission. My two grad school applications were electronic. The article also points out how this trend is growing in the South, where states are trying to revive their traditionally agriculturally-based economies.

"It speaks to a change in economics, moving from agrarian or manufacturing to knowledge based," Dietz said. "Those high-paying agricultural and manufacturing jobs just don't exist any more."

3. And finally, a good explanation of RSS ("the Oprah way").

posted by annie @ 1:03 PM