Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
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Ideas for verifiable electronic voting.
Elections are coming up, and once again, lots of places will be using touchscreen machines. Many of the exact same machines were proven to be compromised in 2004 and 2006, and one of the main companies, Diebold, was taken to court in California and eventually settled for millions of dollars and changed its name.
Anybody who knows me knows that I love technology though. I think that the current electronic systems are terrible (enough that I voted early as a permanent mail ballot voter), but I also think that they offer the potential of having elections that are more fair and verifiable than old fashioned hand-counting. Here are my ideas for how to do it.
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The government is considering what?
I’m hoping that the Washington Times is conducting a social experiment or making a very inappropriate and scary joke, because this is just insane.
The Department of Homeland Security has expressed great interest in making everyone that wants to get on an airplane wear a special bracelet that can be used to shock you so badly that you won’t be able to move for several minutes per shocking. It also features a built in GPS, so they can monitor you and shock you from anywhere. It will have all your personal information stored in it, and can be used for “interrogation purposes” as well.
Expressing interest isn’t the same as seeking implementation, but with stuff like this combined with President Bush pardoning himself against potential war crimes, I’d almost bet that you thought about George Orwell before I even mentioned him in this sentence.
We need January. Immediately.
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My article was published!
I wrote my first article for OSLiving called Windows Security Recommendations, and it got published. Check it out, and then please Digg it to help spread it.
Also, you might want to bookmark it so that you can have something on hand to show people that ask you how they should secure thier computers, or when they ask for recommendations on the first things they should install when they buy a new computer, or whatever. It’s nice to be able to just have one thing to link them to so that they can help themselves.
Sure, I’m partial to my own article, heh. But I really do hope that you find it helpful whether you use it yourself or save it to give to others.
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Partial Return to Windows. Kinda.
It’s been about two years since I left Windows entirely and went all in for Linux, but at long last, I’ve returned to a dual boot setup to play some games that I find awesome. For those of you who haven’t sold your soul to the geek demons, that means that when I turn my computer on, it asks if I want to boot into Linux or Windows.
In particular, I’ve put Windows back on my machines for Civilization 4 and its expansion packs, but I’ve also got a copy of Half Life 2: Episode One, and I may get the Orange Box for PC as well. All of this is done through Steam, which is a pay-once-per-title-forever package manager, and this is nice since I can put all my Steam games on all my machines very easily. Apparently Steam is very popular in the Windows gaming crowd, which is kind of amusing to me since I can’t help but wonder how many of its users know that the idea behind it is pretty directly inspired by the way that most people choose to get software on Linux.
Anyway, it’s interesting. I’m still using Linux most of the time, but when I am logged on to Windows, it seems a little bit quicker than I remember it. Of course, this is probably mostly because it’s such a minimal configuration (it’s pretty much just Steam installed and nothing else). But hey, I’ll give credit where I think it’s due. I also think that the updates and bugfixes they’ve released in the nearly two years have helped as well. And I noticed that now, you only need to download an update and restart to download the validator and restart to download the updates and restart, which is an improvement in the sanity department (it used to be that the chain went on even longer, hehe).
A few people have asked me why I didn’t just use Wine, a free library that allows Unix users to natively run Windows APIs, or one of the commercial spinoffs of Wine, like Cedega or CrossOver. These are great projects and often work well for regular applications, but the fact of the matter is that they aren’t perfect. Wine always seems to be several steps behind the current generation of Windows software when it comes to support and is kind of a hassle to use. Cedega and CrossOver are really good at staying current, but they do cost money (which is questionably legitimate since they’re derivatives of Wine, which is published under the GNU license), and since I’m a miser and have enough Windows discs to legally install on my machines, that was the way to go for me.
Again though, I still use Linux almost all the time because it really is faster, prettier, and way more full-featured. I don’t know that I’ll ever be anything more than a casual gamer, but if I ever do take it to the next level, I’m pretty sure that I’d still use Linux for everything else because frankly, I’m spoiled now. I only wish that most of my friends could play with Linux for a while and see what the big deal is. Good thing I’ve got plenty of Ubuntu discs to give out, if they ever ask.
Update: Well, it’s back to being slow and kludgy compared to Linux. Still not as bad as it could be, but certainly noticeable. Naturally.
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Response to Linux.com Accusations
Recently, Linux.com posted an article called “When open source projects close the process, something’s wrong.” It starts out as a seemingly generalized complaint about open source projects not being so open, but after the first two sentences you realize that it’s just accusing two groups in particular.
The first case accuses the Oxygen Project, which is associated with KDE, of not being open because two of their developers complained in their blog about some guy publishing their icons before them. The second case is about the GIMP, which is sorta-kinda associated with Gnome, not being open because they apparently told somebody that they didn’t have any spots on the team available for them.
With the KDE team, I don’t actually see the issue. They did not demand that it be taken down. They simply pointed out that in a more decent world, they’d be the ones who would get to release first, and that it was kind of an asshole move to take away the first final publication privilege. No actual demand though. See, just because you can take advantage of something, doesn’t mean you aren’t being annoying if you do. The KDE team didn’t actually do anything but say that they thought it was annoying. There is no clause in the GPL or CC license that says they can’t post to their blog when people do annoying things, even if those annoying things happen to be license compliant.
As for the GIMP thing, we’d definitely need more information. No FOSS project that I’m aware of gives final commit abilities to anybody that asks, not even Kernel.org, which is the most famous. However, most of the better ones will still definitely allow people who give a contribution to be on the team, most likely with their own separate SVN or CVS branch or something until they earn commit access to the big thing (notice all the small fish on Kernel.org). So if the guy was flat out turned away and told that they didn’t have room for him as a contributor, then that’s no good. But if they merely didn’t give him commit access, or if he didn’t actually contribute anything but still wanted his own SVN or CVS or whatever branch, that’s also understandable. The article really should have told us exactly what the person offered those GIMP developers.
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