MSNBC video of Rand Paul's Hackathon

[mello]

http://www.msnbc.com/jose-diaz-balar...n-473573443696

[jct74]

tube


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_nZInF3k6A

[jaymur]

is that really what the campaign needs is another way to receive contributions? That's the technology that's going to impress the youth vote that there are several ways to contribute to the campaign? I don't get it.

[specsaregood]

is that really what the campaign needs is another way to receive contributions? That's the technology that's going to impress the youth vote that there are several ways to contribute to the campaign? I don't get it.

I had the same thought. Sounds like a lame choice at the surface; but I'd want to hear the specifics before declaring that for sure. I'm guessing it has something to do with bitcoin given what they said about anonymizing transactions (which makes no sense, since campaign contributions have to be declared).

[CPUd]

Schnell said Checkmate can't be used for campaign contributions. Their target was for businesses who don't want to keep sensitive customer data, but have to due to the nature of e-commerce transactions today being tied to names and addresses.

Some more details about the event:

All but one of the five groups focused on “liberty” rather than “privacy.” As one Team Electorep member put it, “liberty is easier to hack.” A team helmed by a 16-year-old high school student seemed to ignore the prompt entirely, instead creating an app to help with note-taking.

Second place and a miniature Constitution signed by the Senator himself went to a lone programmer who created a Twitter bot that tracks when politicians “flip-flopped” on their positions by crawling campaign website content and then tweeting when it changes.

The grand prize went to three French aerospace engineers who created Checkmate, software that uses biometric authentication, like a fingerprints, rather than a password to pay for for things online. The idea, said Aymeric Rabot, who had driven up from Orange County for the hack-a-thon, was to keep merchants from ever needing to see personal information, like your name or address.

All three were fiercely aligned will Paul, even though, as French citizens, they cannot vote. After the hack-a-thon, a car whisked them away to the Intercontinental hotel in Monterey, where a campaign aide said the senator was attending to “private meetings.”

http://fusion.net/story/158519/rand-...r-hack-a-thon/