Electronic voting problems

by

Ever since the hanging chad and botched elections of 2000, there’s been a push to move to a newer, fancier, more high-tech electronic voting system that would eliminate the problems faced in that election. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Easier to count, data logs with accountability, and all sorts of fancy computerized goodies.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, the reality looks to be falling far short of what is actually needed. New Zealand’s Scoop magazine has a very disturbing article examining Diebold’s electronic voting machines, and investigating just how secure they really are. It’s not good news.

The GEMS election file contains more than one “set of books.” They are hidden from the person running the GEMS program, but you can see them if you go into Microsoft Access.

You might look at it like this: Suppose you have votes on paper ballots, and you pile all the paper ballots in room one. Then, you make a copy of all the ballots and put the stack of copies in room 2.

You then leave the door open to room 2, so that people can come in and out, replacing some of the votes in the stack with their own.

You could have some sort of security device that would tell you if any of the copies of votes in room 2 have been changed, but you opt not to.

Now, suppose you want to count the votes. Should you count them from room 1 (original votes)? Or should you count them from room 2, where they may or may not be the same as room 1? What Diebold chose to do in the files we examined was to count the votes from “room2.”

There’s a lot more in the article, none of it encouraging. A new frontier for voting? Or just more ways to botch up the system? I’m afraid it looks like the latter to me.

(via Lambert)

Discovering TypePad

by

Shelley noticed TypePad weblogs starting to pop up out of the woodwork today, and points out a few that she’s found.

As was mentioned in one of the comments to her post, it’s definitely interesting being in a beta test period with weblogs that are public, and yet being bound by a (limited) NDA that prevents me from saying much of anything about the service itself. This isn’t a complaint at all, mind you — it just means I can’t flood my weblog with “Oooh! Look at that!” and “This is so cool!” and “Check out what I can do!” posts.

In other words, it’s a good thing. ;)

Obviously enough, some of the new toys are going to be fairly obvious, if you know where to look. All I feel entirely safe saying is that everything on this site is created and managed through TypePad — and that’s also a good thing.

And now, I’m off to play some more…

Putting The Long Letter on hold for a bit…

by

NOTICE: This weblog (The Long Letter) will be going on hold for a bit. I’m not disappearing, though — I’m just going to be using Eclecticism as my primary weblog for the duration of the TypePad beta testing project.

As I’m already signed up for the 26 Things and Blogathon projects on this website, though, those posts will be appearing here when they’re ready to go. Just about everything else, however, will most likely be showing up on Eclecticism.

Once the beta test period is over, one of two things will happen: either I will close down Eclecticism and import all of its entries into The Long Letter, or I will move The Long Letter (and djwudi.com) onto TypePad. When the time comes, I’ll be sure to make a note of that.

In the meantime, though — see you over at Eclecticism!

iTMS Exclusive: LXG Soundtrack

by

Looks like Apple’s iTunes Music Store is catching on (or, at the very least, getting enough interest to warrant an interesting experiment): in the US market, the soundtrack for the movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen will only be available through the iTMS — no CD’s will be pressed.

I’ve got mixed feelings on this, personally. One of the things that has kept me from jumping full-bore into the iTMS for my music is the paucity of full ID3 tags in the purchased files. As I’ve been importing my CD collection, I’ve been working on being very thorough with the metadata included with each song: Artist, Title, Album, Year of release, and Composer are all information that I want available in my collection. Unfortunately, with the tracks I’ve purchased from the iTMS so far, Artist, Title, and Album seem to be all you get.

With a soundtrack release that (at least in the US market) has no physical media, how easy is it going to be for me to track down the rest of the metadata that I want included for search and organizational purposes? Not very, would be my guess, which concerns me. I like the idea, concept, and execution of the iTMS a lot, and I do support this experiment — just gimme my metadata!

(via MacRumors)

How do I do this?

by

Okay, so I’ve got this new toy to play with, and I do need to make sure to play with it. I just need to figure out how to play with it.

Possible options:

  • Duplicate my posts: Copy and paste so that what I’m posting here also shows up on The Long Letter, and vice versa.
  • Keep both blogs active: Put some posts over here, and some posts over there. But which ones where?
  • Move over here: Put The Long Letter on hiatus for a bit, and just use this as my primary blog.

There’s pros and cons to each of the options, of course. Hmmmm…

Greetings, Earthlings

by

Just something cool: a weblog from space, written by NASA Science Officer Ed Lu from on board the International Space Station.

At night, the dominant thing you see when you look down is thunderstorms. Lightning lights up the clouds in sometimes spectacular displays. At any given time at night, especially over the tropics, you can see one or more lightning storms going on. The lightning flashes illuminate the clouds from within, and ripple through the storm systems. I enjoy turning off all the lights in the docking compartment, and watching thunderstorm systems at night through its sideward facing windows. The southern Indian Ocean is a great place to watch thunderstorms.

As we near Australia, if you look towards the horizon southward you can see the aurora. The aurora look like glowing green curtains which move upwards from the top of the atmosphere. The curtains intersect the atmosphere in a curved line, which appears as a bright green line south of Australia. There are times when we actually fly through the aurora, and you can look downwards and see the green glow below you. Sometimes there are traces of red along with the predominant green. We’ve taken some time-lapse movies looking towards the horizon as we fly past the aurora.

(via Craig Suchland)