palegray.net writes "Voting machines in several critical swing states are causing major problems for voters. A Government Accountability Office report and Common Cause election study [PDF] has concluded that major issues identified in the last presidential election have not been corrected, nor have election officials been notified of the problems. How long can we afford to trust our elections to black box voting practices? From the article: 'In Colorado, 20,000 left polling places without voting in 2006 because of crashed computer registration machines and long lines. And this election day, Colorado will have another new registration system.'"

DA-MAN asks: "Browsers ship with a ton of different certificate authorities that provide 'trust' for secure sites that we visit. With all of these certificate authorities comes a certificate revocation list, which is to flag bad certs. Firefox, IE and Safari do not have an automated way to pull updated lists from all of the different certificate authorities, so one must download each CRL manually and import them into the browser. It occurred to me the other day that the only time I've ever seen this feature in use was when Microsoft inserted the CRL for a certificate that was mistakenly issued by Verisign with the "Microsoft Corporation" name. All that said, I was just wondering if anyone cares about this? Do you actually import updated CRL's into your browser? Why can't the CRL be signed by the Cert Authority and automatically imported?" What other browsers support automatic CRL updates?

daria42 writes "An article at ZDNet pits the software collaboration kings against each other. IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino 7 goes head to head against Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server 2003. 'If you don't have the resources dedicated to developing collaborative applications, don't have complex application or integration requirements or if you are focused on the Microsoft solution stack, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is going to be hard to beat,' the review concludes."

joe 155 writes "The Register is reporting that ' the PS3 will cost £425 in the UK - over $800'. SCE UK Managing Director Rat Maguire said: 'I don't think it's an expensive machine - I think actually, it's probably a cheap machine. If you think a Blu-Ray player by itself might be £600-700, and we're coming in at just £425, it's a bargain.' Can a console really be viable at this price?"

prostoalex writes "Yahoo! News front page added local news today. Available for logged-in users right on the front page, local news are also delivered at location-specific URLs." There are a few words on the new feature at Search Engine Journal.

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an InfoWorld article about Microsoft's plan to publish some of the findings from last week's Blue Hat conference. From the article: "'Everything was fair game,' wrote SQL Server engineer Brad Sarsfield in a blog posting. 'Hearing senior executives say things like: 'I want the people responsible for those features in my office early next week; I want to get to the bottom of this' was at least one measure of success from my point of view for the event.' The Blue Hat name is a play on the Black Hat conferences, which have occasionally been criticized by IT vendors. The 'Blue' part comes from the color of badges that Microsoft staffers wear on campus." They have descriptions of some of the sessions up on the site for your perusal.