US to begin e-voting investigation

After all the funny questions over the correlations between exit polls and final results it seems that US Federal Government has decided to do a little review to see if there is any truth the matter. Thanks to Louise Ferguson's blog for this one.

Links:
CNET story
UPA Voting and Usability Project

E-Voting: Policy and Practice

Here's a short review of New Media Knowledge - E-Voting: Policy and Practice whilst aimed at the UK, the questions asked are even more applicable to an Irish audience as we now have a Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, TD who's pushing to have those terrible machines used in the European Constitution referendum whilst still without a report or analysis from the 'expert' setup by the Government which has missed any serious computer scientists or more especially any Human Computer Interaction or Interaction Designers !.

Polish Decision KOs the Software Patents Directive

Poland has removed its support for the Software Patents Directive. Given the structural changes in voting numbers due to the Nice Treaty, this ensures that the bill will not meet a qualified majority by at least 16 votes and as such will now have to be sent back to the drawing board. Polish government sources felt that "that the directive does not meet its original objective of limiting patents on software and business methods". This is a great result for the current campaign and allows the directive to be brought back and re-examined to see how it can meet its original objective.

More details on the Register at:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/poland_vote_against/

The Weekend and all the rest

Survived another YFG national conference, this year all the way up in Ballina, Co. Mayo! Got loads of speech footage, which I'll be putting online in the near future as well as a bunch of photos. Great weekend, some stimulating and interesting debates / motions and the elections of course! It was great to see that Lizzy, Barry and Pa all got in. It was a close fight for Barry so I reckon we'll have to try and do more for next year's conference or we could lose the position but at the end it's all down to having good candidates and thats something UL always seems to have plenty of!

Another big event today was Tony Hall successfully passing his Viva, so major congratulations are due to the newest doctor from the IDC! Hurray for Tony as he well deserves this recognition!

New changes from ICANN spell easier domain hijacking

From Netcraft News:
"Domain names could become easier to hijack as a change in domain transfer rules takes effect Friday. Under new rules set by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), domain transfer requests will be automatically approved in five days unless they are explicitly denied by the account owner. This is a change from current procedure, in which a domain's ownership and nameservers remain unchanged if there is no response to a transfer request."
Link to the full article.

More on European Software Patents

Here are links to two informative sites about Software Patents

http://swpat.ffii.org/ (includes a short introduction)
http://nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/intro/index.html (Sponsored by several large European software companies)

Get onto your MEP to highlight the issue and stop this dangerous legislation from being passed.

Open-Source Politics & Political Video Games

Here's an interesting piece on the bottom-up / grass roots approach which occurred within the US Presidential's.

And on a related subject here's an article on Political Video Games, we've seen it with Langerland's Dail Reshuffle but we've so far missed the directed games such as those used by the new Senator John Thune against the now ex-Senator and previous House Minority leader Tom Daschle to further emphasis the theme of his campaign that Tom Daschle was actually two persona's. This was the core of the message which Senator Thune used for the previous two years in his campaign for election and again helped to highlight his core message.

Thune also used a community of bloggers such DaschleVThune to reinforce his message albeit with a negative tone but one that again shows the use of grass root movements via the Internet to achieve a particular campaign goal.

Yet More EVoting bits

Here's Avi Rubin tale of his experience as a Election Judge in the US Presidential's last week. Avi is, amongst others one of the authors of the eye opening IEEE paper 'Analysis of an Electronic Voting System' on the faults with the Diebold electronic voting system which prior to the report was seen as one of the forerunners in the race for replacements to the existing systems used in US states.

Here's a link to a new blog called 'E-Voting News and Analysis, from the Experts' and includes the opinions and views of many informed and prominent computer science and technology people.

Still Recovering

Just got over a bout of Delphi belly which saw me laid low for Thursday, Friday and a bit of today. Hopefully all will be well to be back on form for tomorrow as I'm sick of listening to RTE Radio whining about Kerry's defeat. Now I'm still not supporting Bush but he won and got his mandate so that's democracy in action, like it or not more Americans voted so it is really the case. There is still just about half or a little under that Bush didn't represent so its not like everyone is pro Bush so maybe one in two. Get over it and move on!

Krispin's comments on todays voting

Here's a quote straight from the horse's mouth or Krispin in this case of the feeling of voters in America.

"Just came back from the polls, and there was a great feeling there. Had the
sense that everybody felt they were doing the "right" thing by going, and
that people were proud to be the there."

While there may be recounts and lawyers involved, its good to see that the people in Pennsylvania have the right attitude.