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Poor Touch Screen Layout Designed To Favor Republicans

Bradley Hart — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:27:45 +0000

Once again Americans are being duped. In West Virgina a Republican stronghold that is leaning ever closer to Barack Obama they are now having problems with the voting machines switching a vote from one candidate to another. Not surprising it consistently gives the votes to Republicans in places where they are needed the most. So is this some nefarious plot of a neocon racist christian hacker appalled at the idea of a black president? Nope this is far easier to spot.

The culprit here is bright and as the election official it is simply someone one button when they think they are pushing another. This happens all the time to every ordinary people who touch anything. It is the reason people soME TIMES TYPE with the freaking caps on and not even know it. Unlike the caps lock key which is designed so you can get to it quickly while touch typing, these touch screens are design to take advantage of the situation.

Any good touch screen designer knows two things. First if you want the selections to be accurate they need to have sufficient space between them. Secondly if you want to skew the results it is easy to design an interface to design the screen to take advantage of the situation. The designers of the West Virginia system no doubt no both of these things, or they should. If they don’t the company that designed the interface need to fire their designers.

This design might not be nefarious in nature, but it sorely fails in the perception of impropriety test!

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Computer Security Tools

Bradley Hart — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 02:03:13 +0000

It has been a meh day for blogging and the world of news and technology. I keep seeing the same questions posted by people everywhere I go like what do you do with hamburger, or what antivirus should I use, or do I have to use a firewall? Well it is obvious to me that some of those questions are quite applicable on this blog. Here goes my not so humble answer… it is never humble when you start off an opinion piece with “I think!”

Antivirus

Commercial vs Freeware: If you are a large corporation you may want to buy the commercial product simply because having a big name to blame when someone eventually gets past even you tightest security measures always makes you feel better. I put my money on quality freeware programs that are updated daily for the latest protection. if you are using them for commercially you are honor bound to pay for it, but it is still a lot cheaper than what you pay the other companies.
How many should I use? Just one
Which one do you use? AVG Free Edition

Firewall

The same thing applies for Commercial vs Freeware as it for Antivirus and will spyware.
How Many to use? Just one software based or they can get in the way of each other. For those with High Speed internet in the US (and probably elsewhere too) you will get a fine hardware firewall as part of your equipment package, but it is still advise able to get a separate one for each of your computers.
Which does Brad use? Comodo Firewall, but there are several other good ones out there for free. I like the ease of setup and how little effort it takes to keep it doing its thing quietly.

Anti Spyware.

We have covered free vs commercial already. Like antivirus and firewalls if you like a free product it isn’t bad taste to donate some money to the developers.
How Many? These you can have a couple of if you want, though they can get in each others way if they are constantly running.
Which does brad use? I use two I have a browser toolbar based one from Yahoo, my DSL provider. And I use AVG Anti-spyware. There are other good free ones available, but this updates in concurrence with my antivirus and saves me an occasional extra restart after major upgrades.

Other Tools

I use CCleaner utility which as its name stands for cleans up all the crap on your computer which can both slow down the computer’s performance and leave you vulnerable to attacks.
Defraggler is the best defrag tool I have ever used for free. There are better commercial versions but for as seldom as I have to do defrags or need to do them as fast as possible I am more than happy with this free version.
Recuva is a the best free file recovery tool I have ever use and honestly far superior to most expensive ones.

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Dropping 22TB of Patches on 6,500 PCs in 4 hours: BitTorrent

Bradley Hart — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:57:48 +0000

BitTorrent is often maligned, but overlooking it might be foolish. One IT department found that it can speed patching and image updates so much, that rollouts that once took four days now only take four hours.

Anyone who has using BitTorrents would have been able to tell them about this. For several years now, it has been my primary download tool for watching online videos, for the simple fact that I don’t have to sift though tons of porn to find something I legitimately want to watch. My personal favorite tool is Azureus Vuze with its video card catalog. I have found countless hours of interesting short films from the likes of Underground Film which I blogged about on Saturday on The Other Blog. The real milestone for BT technology will be the day Microsoft or Apple realize how great a tool this is for distributing their own updates to countless millions who snarl up the corporate servers.