Maszman Speaks!

The Open Vot­ing Foun­da­tion has dis­as­sem­bled a Diebold elec­tronic vot­ing machine and dis­cov­ered a seri­ous secu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­ity. It allows the machine to be rebooted with any arbi­trary code, includ­ing an exter­nal flash drive (although the con­nec­tor is not on the board, the sup­port cir­cuitry for it is present). Of course, there’s no hard­copy vote count available.

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Orig­i­nally uploaded by tom­masz.

This odd con­crete con­trap­tion sits near the cor­ner of Broad and Broad­way. The wooden slats are cov­ered in sta­ples so I guess it’s a con­ve­nient poster holder. Any­one have an idea as to what this is sup­posed to be?

The Pop­u­lar­ity Dialer lets you fake a phone call at just the right time. Make peo­ple think you’re pop­u­lar! Get out of that awk­ward meet­ing! This could be my ticket to social acceptability.

There’s an old Erie Canal lock that’s just to the South of the East­bound lanes on the NY State Thruway. It’s Lock 52, bypassed in 1918 when the state rerouted the canal. Now they’re going to turn the lock and sur­round­ing orig­i­nal build­ings into a his­tor­i­cal site, acces­si­ble from the Thruway. I love to see this kind of preser­va­tion, espe­cially around the his­tor­i­cally impor­tant Erie Canal.

Design News takes a look at Boston�s Big Dig, ask­ing the ques­tion “One of Engineering’s Biggest Mis­takes?” There’s going to be a lot of fin­ger point­ing in the com­ing weeks and months but with such a com­plex project it will be dif­fi­cult to pin­point any one sin­gle thing as the root cause.

Play music live, pay a fee to ASCAP. Because oth­er­wise, you’re tak­ing money from poor, starv­ing music publishers.