Courtesy of Om, LightReading’s Phil Harvey has this cool piece showing how the price of his high-speed service from Charter has fallen 80% in three years. Harvey presents a fascinating table that underscores a key point about high-speed Internet access: consumers are willing to pay more on an absolute basis each month for broadband service if speeds keep going up.
Harvey shows how the price per megabit has dropped from $41.94 in September 2003 to $6.04 in September 2006, an effective price cut of 80%. The cause of the price “cut:” Charter has upped the download speed of Harvey’s service from 1.5 Mbps to 10 Mbps.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:27 AM | Print | Comments (1)Business professor and writer Randall Stross has this piece today in the New York Times about the discoveries made by Princeton Professor Ed Felten regarding the security flaws in Diebold’s voting machines. Professor Felten and his colleagues blackened Diebold’s eye by demonstrating that not only is the software security of the company’s AccuVote TS machine easily compromised, but also that the physical security is laughable at best - the machine Felten tested was easily opened by a commonly available key, one that even opens hotel mini-bars.
Diebold’s response to Felten: the machine he tested is “two generations old” and “not used anywhere in the country.” OK, well, why not let Felten and his team test the latest generation machine, Stross asked Diebold. Diebold’s answer, in short, is that the machines are akin to nuclear bombs (kid you not) and no one should get their hands on them.
Mark G. Radke, director for marketing at Diebold, said that the AccuVote machines were certified by state election officials and that no academic researcher would be permitted to test an AccuVote supplied by the company. “This is analogous to launching a nuclear missile,” he said enigmatically, adding that Diebold had to restrict “access to the buttons.”
I persisted. Suppose, I asked, that a test machine were placed in the custodial care of the United States Election Assistance Commission, a government agency. Mr. Radke demurred again, saying the company’s critics were so focused on software that they “have no appreciation of physical security” that protects the machines from intrusion.
Aside from the fact that the last statement isn’t true — Felten and his colleagues proved that the physical security of the machines is faulty — Diebold is living in a fantasy land if it thinks that it won’t, sooner or later, have to give up the new machines to somebody for testing. The first time a candidate loses in a close election or an upset election, the drumbeat of demands for machine testing will be so loud that Diebold will have no other choice but to subject its machines to an independent review.
With this much bad press given to something as sensitive and partisan as elections, it’s only a matter of time before someone gets a look at the new machines.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:17 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
