Was the election hacked?

A couple months after Nov. 2, there's still no definitive proof that George W. Bush or any other candidate came to office this year thanks to electronic voting fraud. But to judge from the online din -- every second e-mail purporting to prove that something's fishy with the results -- a significant minority of Americans refuses to believe that this election was legitimate. This isn't surprising -- it's exactly what experts predicted would occur as a consequence of the wide-scale adoption of paperless electronic machines at the polls. Because these systems record, store and count their ballots digitally, they offer elections officials no way to prove that an election's results reflect the will of the voters, rather than the work of a hacker. As a result, political losers -- this year, supporters of John Kerry -- understandably have a hard time believing that an election conducted electronically has been essentially fair.

Since Salon first began reporting on the shortcomings of electronic voting machines (on Election Day 2002), the issue has leapt to the fore of the public consciousness. During the past year, many mainstream news organizations (led by the New York Times' excellent editorial page coverage) devoted significant space to the issue, and some forward-thinking elections officials (notably in Nevada and California) acted to reform the system by requiring paper trails in their voting machines.

Now that the election is over, Americans -- especially those who have no confidence in this year's results -- ought to push authorities in other jurisdictions to adopt similar measures. And Democrats are not the only ones who have an interest in this: The legitimacy of all elected officials in America is at stake. When a candidate who wins by 3 million votes is still seen by many Americans as possibly fraudulent, reforming the election system would seem to be an urgent matter for Republicans as well as Democrats.

-- Farhad Manjoo

Image nation

The year in pictures online was bloody and revolting, full of images depicting the most grisly, graphic violence. And then, there was Paris Hilton. The question of the year wasn't, should these be published? It was, can you bear to look at them? And what did it mean to watch the last seconds of a man's life before his execution, filmed by his captors for worldwide distribution? Or an heiress, famous for being famous, copulate?

Horrifying torture pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison were trumped only by the gruesome beheading videos coming out of Iraq.

At Abu Ghraib, cameras and videos were used both as sophisticated implements of torture, and later as the tool that exposed those abuses. When U.S. soldiers brutalized and degraded Iraqi prisoners, they took pictures to further humiliate the captives, threatening to ruin the prisoners' reputations by showing the images to families, neighbors and friends. But those same images exposed the abuses in the media and online.

Photos and images created by both soldiers and insurgents helped shaped the debate about Iraq, but could you always trust what you saw?

Photo blogging became as easy as uploading pictures to one of the rapidly multiplying photo services, from Ofoto to Smugmug to Flickr. And it turned soldiers -- and everyone else -- into citizen reporters.

Documenting the daily vagaries of our own lives on camera phones and digital cameras and uploading them to the Web became as ordinary as blogging, e-mailing or instant messaging.

We're all embeds now.

-- Katharine Mieszkowski

The war against sharing

The year seemed to begin well for the music industry's fight against peer-to-peer file traders. Record sales were up slightly, and many in the industry attributed the rise to the industry's extremely punitive copyright-infringement lawsuits against individual file traders. More than that, though, executives were buoyed by the visage of a white knight on the horizon -- a savior in the form of Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, whose stylish iPod and brilliant iTunes Music Store looked to spark a revolution in the way we experience music.

Now things look somewhat less rosy for the music industry, not to mention for Hollywood and other content owners. According to experts, industry lawsuits prompted no appreciable drop in online file-trading activity, although there does seem to have been a shift in the P2P trade: Instead of downloading singles, traders are increasingly interested in downloading much bigger chunks of content, such as full albums, television shows, and entire movies. BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer application celebrated by techies for its capacity to move extremely large files, became both very popular and easy to use in 2004 (especially when combined with RSS, the Web syndication service that ought to get 2004's award for Web geeks' most beloved New Thing) -- a development that doesn't sit well with the media firms.

But while the illegal trade flourished, the legal market for digital music also hit new heights. Apple's iTunes store has sold more than 200 million songs, and its success has prompted many rivals -- including RealNetworks and, more interestingly, Microsoft -- to launch their own online music shops. The iPod, meanwhile, became a kind of cultural icon in 2004, landing on the cover of Newsweek (headline: "iPod Nation") and swelling Apple's bottom line.

But the music industry seems eager to squander even the goodwill of all these shiny happy iPod people. Still more willing to fight its battles on Capitol Hill rather than the marketplace, record labels got their friends in Congress to introduce draconian anti-infringement legislation this summer that would mete out severe penalties to anyone who "intentionally aids, abets, induces or procures" copyright violation by a third person. The measure -- known as the Induce Act -- is so restrictive, critics say, that under its terms many of the technologies we hold dear would never have come to pass. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation: "If this bill had been law in 1984, there would be no VCR. If this bill had been law in 1995, there would be no CD burners. If this bill had been law in 2000, there would be no iPod."

-- Farhad Manjoo

An open-source slam dunk

In the summer of 1999, Salon was invited to observe a showdown at PC Week's testing labs in Foster City, Calif., between Microsoft Windows and Linux. The atmosphere was tense. The Linux representatives were young and arrogant; Microsoft's were middle-aged and arrogant. But at perhaps no moment did the Microsoft reps' self-satisfaction shine through more irritatingly than when they noted the superiority of their in-house approach to software development as compared to the collaborative, distributed, open-source way of doing business. Look at the browser market, one marketing manager noted. A year before, Netscape had released the code to its browser and started the Mozilla project. But it was going nowhere, and in the meantime Internet Explorer 5.0 was taking over.

To open-source advocates, the comment was cutting. Netscape had generated oodles of media hype when it released the source code to its browser, but there was no denying Microsoft's ensuing total domination of the market.

At Salon, we've covered the saga of Mozilla closely ever since, and we've marked several points at which we thought the Mozilla browser had made significant progress. But it often seemed we were shouting at deaf ears. Internet Explorer continued to reign supreme, and when we told our friends and relatives that there was an alternative, they looked at us kind of funny -- like: all that free software stuff was cute back in 1999, but now you're beginning to sound like one of those freaks who still think the Amiga computer is set for a big comeback.

Then came 2004, the release of the 1.0 version of Firefox, the stand-alone Mozilla browser, and the consequent first decline in Microsoft's browser market share in years.

Back in 1999, everything happened on Internet time. But writing good code isn't easy to speed up. Firefox is welcome proof that open-source software programs can be user friendly, easy to install, and competitive with Microsoft. If Salon awarded a Program of the Year medal, it would go to Firefox.

-- Andrew Leonard

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