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Microsoft partners with voting machine maker Hart on election security
ElectionGuard software lets voters check their votes were counted properly.
Michael S. Hart, e-book inventor and Project Gutenberg founder, dies at 64
There's some sad news coming out of Illinois today, where Michael S. Hart, the e-book inventor who founded Project Gutenberg, has died at the age of 64. Hart's literary journey began in 1971, when he digitized and distributed his first text, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the Declaration of Independence he found at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That same year, the Tacoma, Washington native founded Project Gutenberg -- an online library that aims to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks" and to "break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy." By 1987, he'd already digitized a total of 313 books, including works from Homer, Shakespeare and the Bible, before recruiting more volunteers to help out. As of this June, Hart's pioneering library housed about 36,000 works in its collection (most of which are in the public domain), with an average of 50 new books added each week. Described by Project Gutenberg as an "ardent technologist and futurist," Hart leaves a literary legacy perhaps best summed up in his own words. "One thing about eBooks that most people haven't thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we're all able to have as much as we want other than air," he wrote in July. "Think about that for a moment and you realize we are in the right job." Michael S. Hart is survived by his mother and brother.
Voting machine producers criticize critiques
Voting machine makers scoffing at bad reviews? That's preposterous! Actually, it's not all that alarming to hear that Diebold, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia Voting Systems all had less-than-amicable responses to a state study that "found that their machines could be breached by hackers." Of course, we're not exactly sure what all that groaning is about, as we've seen nothing but proof to back the investigation up. Nevertheless, Sequoia dubbed the review "an unrealistic, worst-case-scenario evaluation," Diebold kvetched that the study didn't look at its most recently developed software, Hart found "several inconsistencies, alternate conclusions, and errors," and Elections Systems & Software bypassed the rigmarole entirely by failing to provide their information to the secretary of state. Oh, the irony. [Warning: Read link requires subscription]
