Do Researchers Help or Hurt Our Democracy?
On Thursday morning, The New York Times ran a story about how MIT researchers found alleged flaws in the Voatz software used to support overseas military voters from West Virginia. Voatz has great success with mobile voting in multiple precincts around the country with no security problems. The terrible way in which the Iowa caucus […]
You Can Never Test Too Much
A lot of knowledgeable experts will be weighing in with their points of view about what went wrong with the Iowa caucus vote counting. There were many problems but it is clear as can be the core problem was the lack of testing. I learned decades ago about the importance of testing anything involving software. […]
Password Resolution
One of my friends had his AOL account hacked this week. Unfortunately, I have had many friends to whom this has happened. Some people say it is weak security at AOL, but most experts would say the problem is a weak and or old password. Make a New Year’s Resolution to get a password manager […]
Twenty-two Years of e-Commerce
A handful of us joined with Tim Berners-Lee to start the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT in December 1994. None of us at the time saw the potential for eCommerce. Most of the focus was on techniques for formatting web pages and on various other content related issues. Jim Clark, founder of Netscape, did […]
Internet Guru’s Theory of Evolution
Thanks to Mike Maney, Founder of ManeyDigital, for posting the picture on Instagram. The picture also appears on Instagram at #johnrpatrick. Mike was Public Relations Manager for our Internet Technology group at IBM back in 2000. There was an upcoming story (below) which was to appear in the Los Angeles Times and they wanted a […]