Technology and Elections

Elections are kind of a big thing right now. The United States suffers from unreasonably long election cycles in presidential races, to the point that most major candidates have been on the trail for over a year already, with more than a half year left until election day.

What if that was all for naught? What if someone could harness the internet to affect the results of an election? Andrés Sepúlveda claims to have done exactly that on multiple occasions for elections across Latin America, and is using his 10 year prison sentence for related hacking charges to detail exactly how he operated, and how candidates and officials can better protect themselves from others like himself.

This isn’t just idle thinking. While Facebook promises that it has no interest in controlling elections, both internal and independent studies of activity on the social network indicate that in tight elections, it could swing outcomes based on what is or isn’t shown in newsfeeds. More importantly, if Facebook decided to do this, there’s nothing that could legally compel them to cease, or even disclose that they’re doing this. The last point is important, as it could be nearly impossible to externally perceive with certainty whether they use their invisible hand to guide politics.

If you’ve got more interest, take a look at a TedX talk by Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel, who has been a longterm advocate of open sourcing electronic voting machines, and demonstrating several ways that they can be tampered with on his Princeton research page.

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Researchers Crack Microsoft and Google’s Shortened URLs to Spy on People

Andy Greenberg, Wired

Most of the usage for Bitly and related services is for convenience, with security mainly intended as an afterthought, if considered at all. URL Shorteners are services that allow you to take any URL and shorten it with a custom URL. For instance, last week’s newsletter can be visited if you click through the link http://dino.team/1ML14DD.

The issue with services like this is that after you know the shortener url (like t.co, fb.me, and wp.me for Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.com, respectively), you can start guessing at URLs. Researchers at Cornell Tech were basically able to brute force live URLs for several services that linked to private pages, including Google Drive files, map directions, Microsoft Drive, and more. Basically, the amount of security (beyond private pages) on these links was security through obscurity: it was assumed that people who weren’t given the link wouldn’t be able to stumble upon a 6-8 character combination.

It’s hard to avoid this sometimes, as multiple of these services will create short links for you without giving the option. While several companies have already pledged to improve their security by increasing the character count of the short URLs (which already can defeat their purpose to an extent), some companies have opted to turn off short links entirely. Microsoft OneDrive did this, though the researches point out that URLs saved still point to their respective pages.

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Apple did not invent emoji

Eevee, Fuzzy Notepad

Emoji have been growing more heavily in popularity of late, what with every messaging platform having to support them by default now. A programmer and writer with one of the best URLs ever has written a comprehensive overview of the Unicode Consortium

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I am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He is Wrong About Women in Tech

Amilia St. John, Medium

It takes a lot to piss of your daughter enough for her to right a rebuttal to your views online. Amilia St. John, daughter of WildTangent founder, took to Medium to discuss how disgraced she was with the views of her misogynistic father, who is preaching hiring and promoting techniques that make it hard for technical women like her to thrive in the workforce.

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The Strange Tale of Social Autopsy, the Anti-Harassment Start-up That Descended Into Gamergate Trutherism

Jesse Singal, New York Magazine

Launch a Kickstarter to start an anti-harassment company to specifically deal with cyberbullying. Become a cyberbully yourself. The implosion of Social Autopsy before it even began is a testament to how skewed the arguments over gamergate and online bullying can be.

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