Month: April 2009

Most campaigns don’t come anywhere close to running a NASA-like control room in the way that Plouffe describes. Since field organizers and volunteers reported the results of their canvassing activities up to several times per day using the online voter database, staff at the regional, state, or national level could view reports with real-time counts of voters contacted and their pledged levels of support. To help ensure the quality of voter data being reported, the campaign also tracked volunteering activity and “flake” rates in tandem to monitor the ebb and flow of volunteerism across the campaign.

I think a recent poll showed that 67 percent of people in America are finding the internet as their main news source. And for us to ignore that would be a huge mistake. So although I won’t be totally focused on the internet, I think we have to make sure that people who read newspapers get accurate information from the State Senate, people who are online, people who download video from their telephone, people who twitter – all of these platforms will be coordinated,” Brian Keeler said. “My job is to be the maestro and make sure they’re all playing the same song.

Security researchers Yoann Guillot and Julien Tinnes have found a way to encode malicious code into smileys and provided a proof of concept encoder to automate the process. The researchers said their discovery paves the way for IM malware that would be impossible to detect since the malicious code would be ‘indistinguishable from genuine chat messages.’ I’ve tested the proof of concept code which works very well. Time to panic?

University of Manchester political philosopher Martin O’Neill, who works on equality and social justice, told CNN that activists have a reputation for being early adopters of technology.