But the co-creator (with Ken Thompson) of the Unix operating system and author of the C programming language deserves more than just a moment of silence from programmers everywhere. The modern digital world is built out of the tools that he created, and their descendents. A lifetime employee of Bell Labs and its various corporate spawn, Ritchie was a geek Prometheus. His gift of fire was code that worked on all kinds of different machines and made possible the interconnection of, well, everything. Unix and C are embedded in the deep structure of the Internet and the entire networked computer domain. The world owes Ritchie an awful lot.

“Everything we’ve got,” wrote Paul Adams at Popular Science, “Internet servers, telephone backbones, the microprocessor in the keyboard I’m using to type this — emanates from Ritchie’s work.”

Moments ago, I pulled out a copy of Peter H. Salus’ “A Quarter Century of Unix” and scanned it to see if it would jog any memories of revealing anecdotes about Ritchie. My attention was caught by a picture dated 1986. Bearded, his hair thinning at top, Ritchie is sporting horn-rimmed glasses and a fantastic, jovial grin. He’s also wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of a vaguely Princess Leia lookalike peering out from under the classic symbol for “no” — a circle with a slash through it.

From the picture alone, it’s impossible to parse the T-shirt’s code. Maybe there’s a snappy one-liner beneath the image or on the back of Ritchie’s shirt that explains all. But I didn’t need it. The entire presentation simply screamed out Deep Geek — proclaiming gleeful membership in a Chinese-food-eating hacker tribe that delights in awful puns and ironic juxtaposition, that sees the world a little bit off-kilter from the rest of us iPhone-twiddling drones, from all the billions of  inhabitants of the networked world that people like him made possible. I don’t know what the shirt means, but on Dennis Ritchie’s 55-year-old chest, it looks iconic. Let’s put it this way, if the characters in the sit-com “Big Bang Theory” had to bid against each other on eBay to buy that shirt, the price would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars within minutes. And why not — geeks like Ritchie built the Internet!

And they did it, not because they wanted money, or even necessarily to foist something “insanely great” on the general public. They did it because that’s what they were interested in, because it in some way improved their own lives and they wanted to share the results.

There’s a great quote from Ritchie at the end of “A Quarter-Century of Unix” that captures the essence of his contribution perfectly:

Some people have the impression that the original Unix work was a bootleg project, a “skunk works.” This is not so. Research workers are supposed to discover or invent new things… We always had management encouragement… Our intent was to create a pleasant computing environment for ourselves and our hope was that others liked it.

The greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance… Another danger is that commercial pressure of one sort or another will divert the attention of the best thinkers from real innovation to exploitation of the current fad, from prospecting to mining a known lode.

If we can keep alive enough openness to new ideas, enough freedom of communication, enough patience to allow the novel to prosper, it will remain possible for a future Ken Thompson to find a little-used CRAY/1 computer and fashion a system as creative, and as influential, as Unix.

What a wonderful credo! Death to excessive relevance! Geekier words were never spoken!

First, it gives people who have something to say an unprecedented audience that’s both instantaneous and quintessentially democratic. The eulogy is no longer the preserve of the great and the good. Online, anyone can be a broadcaster, a commentator or a curator of news and information.

Social media has also awakened the newshound in many of us. We want to be the first to comment, and when it comes to death, we no longer have to sit back passively and wait for the obit in the next morning’s newspaper. Moreover, we can be part of a popularity contest, as blogs listing the “10 most quoted tweets about Steve Jobs” demonstrate.

Using death as a competition to produce the fastest tweet or the post with the most hits might seem a little self-serving and, frankly, insensitive. But there’s more to this than just a race to be first. Collective mourning is important in any society. It unites us and gives us permission to contemplate personal loss — to pull those deep reserves of grief out from their hiding places. Social media assists this process. More of us can engage when, rather than having to walk to a remembrance site (or an Apple store) with a yellow ribbon or drive to a roadside shrine with flowers, we can sit at home and tap out our feelings.

When it comes to grieving, social media gives us instant, global connectivity as well as a rich palette for expression. Online, text, photographs, audio and video mean we can easily share memories and broadcast public reflection. Essentially, technology is turbo-charging the process of collective mourning.

However, social media also returns to us things we’ve lost — a few rules, for a start. Today’s secular society gives little guidance on how to deal with grief. In the absence of traditional mourning rituals, we struggle in the face of death. What should we say? What should we do? In societies where ritual remains strong, no one needs to ask how to express loss or honor the dead. Specified times and places for grieving are part of carefully defined of cultural conventions. The rules allow for emotion but set boundaries for mourners, preventing unfettered anguish from being let loose.

If rituals provide ways of containing our grief, online formats do something similar. They give us room for creativity but they also set limitations (in the case of Twitter, that’s 140 characters). Whether it’s Facebook’s wall, an online newsfeed or a tweet, online formats establish the kinds of frameworks that help us hold it together when we feel we’re falling apart.

Technology also gives us back convening power. For death has never — at least until recently — been a solitary affair. You still see it in the Jewish tradition of sitting Shiva, with friends and neighbours visiting the bereaved during the seven-day mourning period. In New Guinea, the moment someone from the Mafulu tribe of dies, all the men start shouting loudly — or at least they did in 1910, when ethnologist Robert Wood Williamson, recorded details of their death rites. This was partly to scare off evil spirits, but as the chain of shouts moved from village to village, residents from surrounding valleys poured into the home of the deceased as word spread that the community had just lost one of its members.

Obviously, this isn’t so easy today. Friends and family are dispersed more widely than ever. In this globalized world, we need to find ways of shouting about our dead and places in which to gather to express empathy and support. And if we can’t do that physically, we can do it online. As humans, we’re hardwired to form communities and to unite at our most significant moments. So while in volume, speed and global reach, what we saw on Wednesday in the wake of Steve Jobs’ death was new, in some ways it was nothing more than a high-tech version of a practice that’s been going on for centuries — the practice of getting together to say goodbye.

Sarah Murray is author of “Making an Exit: From the Magnificent to the Macabre — How We Dignify the Dead” (St Martin’s Press, October 11, 2011); www.makinganexit.net, @makinganexit, makinganexit.tumblr.com

“We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines,” said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team “We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine.”

The Argonne Lab, run by the Department of Energy, has the mission of conducting scientific research to meet national needs. The Diebold Accuvote voting system used in the study was loaned to the lab’s scientists by VelvetRevolution.us, of which the Brad Blog is a co-founder. Velvet Revolution received the machine from a former Diebold contractor

Previous lab demonstrations of e-voting system hacks, such as Princeton’s demonstration of a viral cyber attack on a Diebold touch-screen system — as I wrote for Salon back in 2006 — relied on cyber attacks to change the results of elections. Such attacks, according to the team at Argonne, require more coding skills and knowledge of the voting system software than is needed for the attack on the Diebold system.

Indeed, the Argonne team’s attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine’s proprietary source code. It was carried out by inserting a piece of inexpensive “alien electronics” into the machine.

The Argonne team’s demonstration of the attack on a Diebold Accuvote machine is seen in a short new video shared exclusively with the Brad Blog [posted below]. The team successfully demonstrated a similar attack on a touch-screen system made by Sequoia Voting Systems in 2009.

The new findings of the Vulnerability Assessment Team echo long-ignored concerns about e-voting vulnerabilities issued by other computer scientists and security experts, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (an arm of the Department of Homeland Security), and even a long-ignored presentation by a CIA official given to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

“This is a national security issue,” says Johnston. “It should really be handled by the Department of Homeland Security.”

The use of touch-screen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems of the type Argonne demonstrated to be vulnerable to manipulation has declined in recent years due to security concerns, and the high cost of programming and maintenance. Nonetheless, the same type of DRE systems, or ones very similar, will once again be used by a significant part of the electorate on Election Day in 2012. According to Sean Flaherty, a policy analyst for VerifiedVoting.org, a nonpartisan e-voting watchdog group, “About one-third of registered voters live where the only way to vote on Election Day is to use a DRE.”

Almost all voters in states like Georgia, Maryland, Utah and Nevada, and the majority of voters in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas, will vote on DREs on Election Day in 2012, says Flaherty. Voters in major municipalities such as Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh will also line up in next year’s election to use DREs of the type hacked by the Argonne National Lab.

Voting machine companies and election officials have long sought to protect source code and the memory cards that store ballot programming and election results for each machine as a way to guard against potential outside manipulation of election results. But critics like California Secretary of State Debra Bowen have pointed out that attempts at “security by obscurity” largely ignore the most immediate threat, which comes from election insiders who have regular access to the e-voting systems, as well as those who may gain physical access to machines that were not designed with security safeguards in mind.

“This is a fundamentally very powerful attack and we believe that voting officials should become aware of this and stop focusing strictly on cyber [attacks],” says Vulnerability Assessment Team member John Warner. “There’s a very large physical protection component of the voting machine that needs to be addressed.”

The team’s video demonstrates how inserting the inexpensive electronic device into the voting machine can offer a “bad guy” virtually complete control over the machine. A cheap remote control unit can enable access to the voting machine from up to half a mile away.

“The cost of the attack that you’re going to see was $10.50 in retail quantities,” explains Warner in the video. “If you want to use the RF [radio frequency] remote control to stop and start the attacks, that’s another $15. So the total cost would be $26.”

The video shows three different types of attack, each demonstrating how the  intrusion developed by the team allows them to take complete control of the Diebold touch-screen voting machine. They were able to demonstrate a similar attack on a DRE system made by Sequoia Voting Systems as well.

In what Warner describes as “probably the most relevant attack for vote tampering,” the intruder would allow the voter to make his or her selections. But when the voter actually attempts to push the Vote Now button, which records the voter’s final selections to the system’s memory card, he says, “we will simply intercept that attempt … change a few of the votes,” and  the changed votes would then be registered in the machine.

“In order to do this,” Warner explains, “we blank the screen temporarily so that the voter doesn’t see that there’s some revoting going on prior to the final registration of the votes.”

This type of attack is particularly troubling because the manipulation would occur after the voter has approved as “correct” the on-screen summaries of his or her intended selections. Team leader Johnson says that while such an attack could be mounted on Election Day, there would be “a high probability of being detected.” But he explained that the machines could also be tampered with during so-called voting machine “sleepovers” when e-voting systems are kept by poll workers at their houses, often days and weeks prior to the election or at other times when the systems are  unguarded.

“The more realistic way to insert these alien electronics is to do it while the voting machines are waiting in the polling place a week or two prior to the election,” Johnston said. “Often the polling places are in elementary schools or a church basement or some place that doesn’t really have a great deal of security. Or the voting machines can be tampered while they’re in transit to the polling place. Or while they’re in storage in the warehouse between elections,” says Johnston. He notes that the Argonne team had no owner’s manual or circuit diagrams for either the Diebold or Sequoia voting systems they were able to access in these attacks.

The  team members are critical of election security procedures, which rarely, if ever, include physical inspection of the machines, especially their internal electronics. Even if such inspections were carried out, however, the Argonne scientists say the type of attack they’ve developed leaves behind no physical or programming evidence, if properly executed.

“The really nice thing about this attack, the man-in-the-middle, is that there’s no soldering or destruction of the circuit board of any kind,” Warner says. “You can remove this attack and leave no forensic evidence that we’ve been there.”

Gaining access to the inside of the Diebold touch-screen is as simple as picking the rudimentary lock, or using a standard hotel minibar key, as all of the machines use the same easily copied key, available at most office supply stores.

“I think our main message is, let’s not get overly transfixed on the cyber,” team leader Johnston says. Since he believes they “can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine,” he recommends a number of improvements for future e-voting systems.

“The machines themselves need to be designed better, with the idea that people may be trying to get into them,” he says. ” If you’re just thinking about the fact that someone can try to get in, you can design the seals better, for example.”

“Don’t do things like use a standard blank key for every machine,” he warns. “Spend an extra four bucks and get a better lock. You don’t have to have state of the art security, but you can do some things where it takes at least a little bit of skill to get in.”

————

The video demonstration and explanation of the Diebold “Man-in-the-Middle” attack, as developed by Argonne National Lab’s Vulnerability Assessment Team, follows below. Their related attack on a Sequoia voting system can be viewed here.

* * *

  Now I can sleep peacefully, knowing a giant monkey will never try to commandeer my helicopter. Or at least, not yet.

2. Humanoid robot learns to love bake:

Is this really the best idea that the greatest scientific minds of our century could come up with when they were dreaming up an android?  “Forget that Isaac Asimov stuff, I want my robot to make me delicious cookies!”

Good job, science.

3. The wonders of the Hampton Jitney:

Musician/comedian Nina Katchadourian sings about a life deprived of the magical machine that takes New Yorkers up to their summer homes. 

She sounds so much like Joni Mitchell that the alternate title of this song could be “They paved paradise so we’d get up to Montauk.”

4. A celebrity plea to the president regarding gay marriage:

“President Obama, will you say ‘I Do’?” features Larry King, David Hasselhoff, Mini-Me (Verne Troyer) and more, as part of the NOH8 campaign.

I thought the protest against California’s repeal of gay marriage was a silent project?

5. Katy Perry brings out special star for duet:

Aw, I feel like Katy is Rebecca Black’s protective older sister; taking the “Friday” singer under her wing and protecting her against the haters.  Here are the two of them singing Black’s much-loathed single during Perry’s concert in L.A. last week.

How did this happen? Early today, stories began popping up on Twitter and other social-networking sites hinting at the actor’s demise, with links promising “breaking news” on the event. To be fair, considering where we left the warlock, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to wonder whether his winning luck had run out.

Fortunately for Sheen, he’s not dead. He’s just been taking a really long nap, according to a recent tweet from the actor’s account.

Unfortunately, clicking that link from your friend’s Twitter or Facebook page leads you to a site that looks exactly like YouTube. According to Mashable — who wrote an article about this in March, when the virus was first discovered — clicking on any part of this clone page causes the link to post on your own Facebook page, perpetuating the worm. And it doesn’t end there:

Then, the user is asked to complete a survey before viewing the video, which adds a lead-gen layer to the click-jacking scheme. Finally, some folks are reporting being infected with malware after visiting the site, as well.

Mashable gives some good advice on how to protect yourself against these kinds of social-media bugs, but for those already infected, it’s cold comfort. On the plus side, Charlie Sheen can rest easy tonight, knowing that the latest terrible event with his name attached to it doesn’t involve his live show.