plasticbag.org: On the design of American State flags

Tom Coates casts a quizzical eye on some of the state flags: “the flag for Arkansas reminds me of the label of a sardine can.” Bonus link from the comments: Snopes’ “no, I meant a pear” urban legend. Believe them? Check here.

Boing Boing: Amazon Unbox to customers: Eat shit and die

Cory Doctorow dissects the Amazon Unbox user agreement: “Amazon Unbox takes away your privacy and every conceivable consumer right you have, and then tells you that the goods you buy from them don’t belong to you, and they can take them away from you at any time, or change the deal you get from them without any appeal by you.” Even filtered through Doctorow’s evangelically anti-DRM stance, this is strong stuff.

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

The abstract alone should scare the willies out of you; the full paper just gets scarier and scarier. Election-stealing voting machine viruses: glub.

SFGate.com: New Stamps Misspell 'Motorcycle'

USPS finds a typo in a first-day cover postmark. Response: “[buyers] can still order the version with the incorrect postmark”. Very clever: most collectors will want both versions.