John Palfrey

The quite wonderful, fully addictive Electoral-Vote.com
is seeking further backups, and thinking through their RSS strategy as
well.  Seems they’ve been victims of attacks (why?).  Read to
the bottom of the page:

“Finally, there was another attack Friday, but we seem to have done
better this time. As a precaution against future attacks, I have
installed a fourth server. If you can’t get through to
 www.electoral-vote2.com,
 www.electoral-vote4.com in that order. The
main one is far more powerful than the others and has multiple
fiber-optic connections to the Internet. It is also updated first, so
please use only www.electoral-vote.com unless it is not working.
Another alternative in case of an attack is the RSS feed, which is much
harder to attack.

I would be interested in getting a one or two more backups for
emergency use in case of future attacks. I have had some volunteers,
but it is hard to tell if they are friend or foe. That kind offer from
 sneaky-joe at unknown-company.com might be from one of the attackers, who
wants to run a server with doctored data. I thought of a simple filter
that will probably reduce this problem to a minimum. The server should
be in the .edu domain (NOT .com or .net) and the contact person should
be a tenured professor. Senior faculty members tend to have a long
paper trail and would be risking their careers by attacking a political
website or monkeying with the data. Since there is hardly any time
left, I basically want a clone of the current servers to make sure
everything works the first time. The required configuration is a
Pentium 4 or Pentium III with 512 MB RAM or more, at least 1 GB of
available disk space, and a connection to the Internet capable of
serving 500,000 small files an hour. The software should be UNIX, BSD,
or Linux (NOT Windows or Mac OS X) running Apache and a couple of other
things I will tell potential sites privately. Also needed is an
experienced system administrator who has earned his spurs dealing with
large-scale attacks. BEFORE making an offer, please check with your
local system administrator about the configuration, capacity, and
hackproofness.”

Two HLS students, both in Cyberlaw and the Global Economy and very up to speed on these issues, are writing about digital media — Tim Armstrong (also here, from Tim) and Aaron Kotok.  Stay tuned.

Today, the Berkman Center is hosting a CEO roundtable for leaders of VoIP concerns talking about getting net (and voice) access to the next billion people, organized in conjunction with VON.  Daniel Berninger is the convener.  He’s assembled a wonderful crew.  Hard questions:

* When will the latency be low enough from end-to-end on the relevant IP connections to make VoIP calling as good or better than voice?  (Which would render quality and reliability concerns moot very quickly.)

* When, if ever, is a tax-and-subsidy regime appropriate as a regulatory matter, to fund universal access or other goals?  (Ethan Zuckerman lit up the room by suggesting that, though he is not in favor of such subsidies as an abstract matter, sometimes a compromise of this sort is necessary in order to promote VoIP deployment. From there, I think he was Misunderstood.)

David Weinberger, Berkman fellow and all-around famous guy, has more, on his reax to our panel this morning.  Judith Meskill has an extensive weblog entry on the VoIP blog.  Ory Okolloh is here and has made some of the day’s most provocative comments; maybe see if she blogs the event at all.