Mobile news curation uses human editors and good design to improve the experience of reading the news on smartphones.

In 1704, John Campbell, Boston’s postmaster, turned his handwritten newsletter into a printed half-sheet, called it the Boston News-Letter, and founded the first continuously published newspaper in the Colonies. He soon found a circulation of around 250 eager subscribers. “Royal proclamations and international news appeared first, followed by news from other colonies, and finally local news,” writes the journalist Tom Standage in Writing on the Wall: Social Media—the First 2,000 Years. “Campbell gathered information by talking to sailors, travelers, local officials, and visitors to his post office, and via handwritten newsletters from other postmasters. But most of the stories in the Boston News-Letter were simply copied from the London papers.” Campbell had been writing a kind of blog, which he made into a business that curated the news.

Amid a wide range of new platforms to manage streams of data from the Internet of things, a simple version emerges that anyone can use.

With the advent of the Internet of things, potentially billions of devices will report data about themselves, making it possible to create new applications in areas as diverse as factory optimization, car maintenance, or simply keeping track of your stuff online. But doing this today requires at least some degree of programming knowledge. Now Bug Labs, a New York City company, is trying to make it as easy to create an Internet of things application as it is to put a file into Dropbox.

Amid a wide range of new platforms to manage streams of data from the Internet of things, a simple version emerges that anyone can use.

With the advent of the Internet of things, potentially billions of devices will report data about themselves, making it possible to create new applications in areas as diverse as factory optimization, car maintenance, or simply keeping track of your stuff online. But doing this today requires at least some degree of programming knowledge. Now Bug Labs, a New York City company, is trying to make it as easy to create an Internet of things application as it is to put a file into Dropbox.

We were happy to see that ACM is using the Helios online voting system for a number its elections this year, including the 2014 ACM Council election. ACM members, all 100,000 of them, have the option of voting online via the Web or requesting a paper ballot in the election of ACM’s top officers. This demonstrates the confidence that the “world’s largest educational and scientific computing society” has in the technology of online verifiable voting systems.

Helios is an example of an end-to-end verifiable voting system that uses cryptographic techniques that can provide ballot privacy as well as high confidence that errors and fraud will be detected and that the election outcome is correct.  Such systems let voters verify that their votes were not modified and were counted without revealing which candidates were voted for. In some cases, they allow anyone to determine that all of an election’s ballots have been correctly counted and also help prevent coercion and vote selling by making it impossible for a voter to prove how she voted to a third party.

Among the things we like about Helios is that it provides a free service that anyone can use to hold end-to-end verifiable votes on the Web and that its code is open sourced, allowing one to study the (mostly Python)  code and install and run it on their own computers.

Developing verifiable voting systems has been one of the research activities of UMBC’s Center for Information Security and Assurance for more than six years. Professor Alan Sherman and his students contributed to Scantegrity, the first end-to-end verifiable voting system used in a binding municipal election.  The UMBC team oversaw that first use in the Takoma Park, Maryland municipal election in November, 2009.   A subsequent system, Remotegrity, was used to allow Takoma Park residents to submit absentee ballots over the Internet in the November 2011 Takoma Park election.  A current secure voting project in Professor Sherman’s lab is led by Ph.D. student Christopher Nguyen, who is developing techniques to support random-sample elections.

We were happy to see that ACM is using the Helios online voting system for a number its elections this year, including the 2014 ACM Council election. ACM members, all 100,000 of them, have the option of voting online via the Web or requesting a paper ballot in the election of ACM’s top officers. This demonstrates the confidence that the “world’s largest educational and scientific computing society” has in the technology of online verifiable voting systems.

Helios is an example of an end-to-end verifiable voting system that uses cryptographic techniques that can provide ballot privacy as well as high confidence that errors and fraud will be detected and that the election outcome is correct.  Such systems let voters verify that their votes were not modified and were counted without revealing which candidates were voted for. In some cases, they allow anyone to determine that all of an election’s ballots have been correctly counted and also help prevent coercion and vote selling by making it impossible for a voter to prove how she voted to a third party.

Among the things we like about Helios is that it provides a free service that anyone can use to hold end-to-end verifiable votes on the Web and that its code is open sourced, allowing one to study the (mostly Python)  code and install and run it on their own computers.

Developing verifiable voting systems has been one of the research activities of UMBC’s Center for Information Security and Assurance for more than six years. Professor Alan Sherman and his students contributed to Scantegrity, the first end-to-end verifiable voting system used in a binding municipal election.  The UMBC team oversaw that first use in the Takoma Park, Maryland municipal election in November, 2009.   A subsequent system, Remotegrity, was used to allow Takoma Park residents to submit absentee ballots over the Internet in the November 2011 Takoma Park election.  A current secure voting project in Professor Sherman’s lab is led by Ph.D. student Christopher Nguyen, who is developing techniques to support random-sample elections.

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot

Go on an egg hunt with Saatchi & Saatchi http://depot.ly/vS3PX

Interesting Wikipedia concept http://depot.ly/vS3IR  via @dribbble

12 Little-Known CSS Facts http://depot.ly/vS391  *Good read via @sitepointdotcom

#Typography is a practice: http://ow.ly/vS35i  via @BrushLovers

Google Offers Sneak Peek At Latest Google Glass Software Update http://depot.ly/vQaJs  via @marketingland

The beauty of Nick Meek’s photography http://depot.ly/vQaby  via @fubiz

Nice tip: How to Add Audio to PowerPoint Presentations http://depot.ly/vQ9pW

Google’s modular mobile could be with use within a year http://depot.ly/vQanS

Want to build a website but don’t know where to start? Here are 59 tutorials to help you out http://depot.ly/vMIVs  via @CreativeBloq

Good read: 12 ways to get the most from Behance http://depot.ly/vMIjN  via @tutsplus

Google’s Dead-Simple Tool For Making UX Decisions: 2 Jars Of Marbles http://depot.ly/vJU7d

A Beginner’s Guide to UX & UI Design http://depot.ly/vEunr  via @justcreative

Get it Done: 35 Habits of the Most Productive People [Infographic] http://depot.ly/vEBzJ  via @EntMagazine

Do’s and Don’ts of Using Light Typefaces http://depot.ly/vExnh

Want more? No problem! Keep track of all our tweets by following us @DesignerDepot

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