The looming question is whether the activity surrounding e-voting signals a willingness to build consensus around a commonly accepted e-voting security apparatus, or is, instead, the preparation for a competing stakeholders' titanic clash in the billion-dollar-plus market of e-voting systems.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA), an international alliance of software publishers, placed the global software piracy rate at 39 percent in 2002, down from 40 percent the year before, and from a high of 49 percent in 1994. The game industry is working out an uneasy truce with pirates to do business, and new technologies to combat piracy are taking customer enjoyment into account.