A couple of pictures from the Lahinch trip

Here are a few pictures from the surfing trip in Lahinch. Cheers Krispin !



The four lads

Krispin, Edward and Paul

More EVoting bits

ElectricNews.net has a nice piece today on including a paper trail for electronic voting at http://www.electricnews.net/frontpage/news-9556350.html. It also mentions the findings of the commission which was setup in Ireland to investigate electronic and how they could not either certify the closed source code used in the system and that the lack of a paper verifiable audit trail was a definite point of issue. Given that the government appointed the commission I'm suprised they're judgement went even this far.

But as always these articles are lacking in some key aspects, the EVM2003 or Electronic Voting Machine project (http://evm2003.sourceforge.net/) which offers an open source implementation of the Open Voting Consortium (OVC) http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ design standards. This was used successfully in Californa and would only have cost the Irish taxpayer for the actual machinery used and not for the software. It would have been more like €5 million rather €50.

One good reference which I think people are not reading is the paper: Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, Kohno T., Stubblefield A., Rubin A.D., Wallach D.S., Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P’04). This paper is a very comprehensive analysis of the US systems but the approaches taken are applicable to any system used as an electronic voting system. More details and information at http://avirubin.com/vote/.

New Java Speech Recogniser available as OS

Sphinx-4 written by the Sphinx group at Carnegie Mellon University, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), and Hewlett Packard (HP). It features contributions from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Project page: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/sphinx4/#what_is_sphinx4
Downloads: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1904&package_id=117949

Jurgen's Fringe Performance Details

Jurgen Simpson, the new MusTech course leader here in UL is all set to take part in the Dublin Fringe, so lets all go up to offer our support and have a few pints after! Good luck Jurgen!

Band The Jimmy Cake
Date: Thursday 7th October
On stage: 9pm
Tickets: €12.00
Book online at www.fringefest.com or phone 1850 374463
Venue: The Spiegeltent
George’s Dock
IFSC,
Dublin 1


The Jimmy Cake
Since their formation in July 2000, Dublin 9-piece The Jimmy Cake have blazed a trail of experimental innovation leaving hoards of enthralled converts in their wake. Hailed by some critics as the most exciting live band and the most powerful musical force in Ireland The Jimmy Cake have recently gone into hiding to begin work on the follow up to 2003’s Superlady. The new material displays a more mature approach to song writing with the arrangements more complex and the melodies shimmering brighter than ever before. The Jimmy Cake maintained that this self imposed exile from the live circuit would only be compromised if they were asked to play a Belgian Mirror Tent that once played host to Marlene Dietrich. In a bizarre twist the Cake have been added to the Fringe Festival Spiegeltent line up and will play the Belgian Mirror tent that once played host to Marlene Dietrich on October 7th. With snippets from the forthcoming album to be premiered for those who make the journey and rumours of a brass band accompanying the Cake this promises to be a night of pure magic.

More interesting cyber politics antics

From the register.co.uk
The Labour Party has been accused of being behind a "desperate dirty tricks campaign" after it registered three domains bearing the name of Tory leader Michael Howard.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/28/labour_tory_knockabout/

It's great to see that political hatchet jobs have now combined with the normal use of Internet sites to trash your opponent with the extra touch of cyber squatting. It might have something to do with the fact that most Irish politicians where frightened into preventing this by last year's run on Bertie Ahern and Gerry Adams domains.