The collision of two bad ideas -- unverified e-voting and VeriSign -- is a really, really bad idea.

VeriSign has been chosen by Accenture (the former Andersen Consulting) to provide key components of an Internet absentee voting system for Americans abroad. This is the same VeriSign that recently unilaterally altered the workings of the domain name system to return a VeriSign search page when someone mis-typed a .com or .net URL.

I can see it now: mis-mark your ballot and your vote gets automatically redirected to the candidate of VeriSign's choice. "We found these similar candidates: Did You Mean to vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger?"

In a rare blow for sense in the DMCA muddle, an Illinois district court ruled that replacement garage door openers were not "circumvention" devices under the DMCA's anticircumvention provision. Chamberlain, a maker of garage door opener devices, claimed that Skylink's interoperable replacements circumvented its access controls, but couldn't manage to show the court how accessing one's own car was the kind of harm Congress envisioned when passing the DMCA. Maybe if they'd called it a boat garage ...