Bipartisan 9/11 Bill Offered to Congress; Nevada Voting Machine Leaves Paper Trail; Open Source Groups Line Up Against Microsoft Antispam Plan

Bipartisan 9/11 Bill Offered to Congress

Legislators didn’t waste any time putting a bill that would enact virtually all of the 9/11 panel’s 41 recommendations before the House and Senate as Congress returned from its summer recess yesterday. Senators Joseph I. Lieverman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz) cosponosrs of the Senate bill were major backers of the establishment of the 9/11 panel and investigation. An identical bill will be introduced in the house, according to a New York Times report. The McCain-Lieberman bill would create an office called the National Intelligence Authority and a new “national intelligence director” to run it and oversee the work of the Central Intelligence Agency and the government’s 14 other spy agencies.

For more details, read the full article in The New York Times.

Nevada Voting Machine Leaves Paper Trail

Nevada voters became the first in the nation yesterday to use touch-screen computers that leave a paper voting record. There were reports of a few hiccups, according to the Associated Press, but generally speaking the computers used for the primary performed well. The $9.3 million voting system, which includes more than 2,600 computers and printers deployed in every county, could become a model for other states, according to the report.

For more details, read the full Associated Press article in the Los Angeles Times.

Open Source Groups Line Up Against Microsoft Antispam Plan

Sender ID, Microsoft’s standard for closing loopholes in the current e-mail system that allow senders to take or “spoof” a message’s origin, has been rejected by two prominent open-source software groups. According to an IDG News Service (a sister company to CXO Media) report, both the Apache Software Foundation and the Debian Project say the standard does not meet their standards for software distributed with their products, making Sender ID incompatible with open-source products. Microsoft’s Royalty-Free Sender ID Patent License Agreement does not allow licensees to “sublicense” Sender ID licenses. This runs against the spirit of open-source software, where sublicensing is common.

For more details, read the full article on IDGNews.net.