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Last week I came out in favor of electronic voting. Over the weekend, it turned out that its opponents' worst fears came true. Not only was some computer software buggy, but it actually threw a state election the wrong way. And though not very likely, it's even possible that this state will determine our next president! Have I changed my mind about electronic voting?

No, because the punchline is: New Mexico still uses dead trees. The bug was in the software that counts paper ballots.

New Mexico was given to Gore on election night by 6,800 votes because of buggy computer software. That software "failed to read" straight-party votes (oops!), and worse, it "also chose at least one candidate from another party."

If computer flaws had thrown an electronic-vote election, you'd be reading about it on the front page of every newspaper across the country, and pundits would be telling us (sometimes in ways very funny) how foolish we were to trust our votes to those nasty computers.

How many presidential elections does our 19th-century technology have to nearly destroy before the alternatives get serious consideration?

A friend in Sweden tells me that the U.S.A. is now being referred to as the B.R.A., the Banana Republic of America. Maybe by the 21st century we can have 20th-century voting machines installed at our polling places, what do you think?

(New Mexico could decide the election if Florida's votes are thrown out, Oregon goes to Bush, and one or two more improbabilities occur.)

Voting, right here in River(side) County Riverside County, California, used touch-screen voting in this last election. This is very different from internet voting since there was no network to the outside world. I think this is an important step and certainly should be done first.

ABC News's report describes Riverside's system and shows a photo. Randall Gardner points out that the local paper has a great story with an overview of the system and reactions from voters -- glitches, yes; late tally, yes; but all in all it sounded like a positive experience.

With a capital V and that rhymes with C and that stands for Canberra Dracophile points out an article from the Fairfax IT News website, which:

reports that voters in the Australian Capital Territory (in which our nation's capital, Canberra, lies) "could be the first in the nation to trial electronic voting at next year's territory election", according to the territory's Chief Minister, Gary Humphries. They're hoping to pass legislation next month to bring this about. Sounds cool, but the article goes on to quote Humphries as saying, "You might as well be doing it from your own home." Is it just me, or does this raise the possibility of voters being coerced into a particular vote where this sort of thing can't be seen? I'd prefer to see electronic voting available only from polling booths.

No grunge typefaces please User-interface wonks should enjoy this pure-and-simple design contest. Web Memes, Inc. is asking you to design a ballot, preferably one as unconfusing as possible while still using (spit) paper. You also get to make up your own candidates and issues.

(If the competition were digital, instead of paper, it would be a tough call between Amazon.com's new user interface and AmIPresidentOrNot.)

Busily coding your next election... ...is Jason Kitcat, who says "I'm working really hard on the next release and haven't given it the PR time it deserves." Allow me.

FREE is "Free Referenda & Elections Electronically," "the first open source system for conducting electronic votes." We're now jumping from mere electronic tallying of votes in polling places to actual internet voting, so please keep your hands inside the browser at all times.

Originally an academic thesis, FREE is now GPL'd, written in Java, and its design background is available in whitepapers. I haven't tried running it. Someone let us know if the project could be useful.

See also thebell.net, which comments:

...the majority of paper punching systems used in the U.S. do not produce repeatable results when ballots are tallied more than once, which means that election officials lack the means to objectively distinguish between fraud and error under these circumstances. ...we should in fact be looking to Internet voting systems in order to try to reduce those faults and thus provide for more security than what is available today -- not less security.

The seriously skeptical view Let's end on a sobering note. Scoffing at The Bell's claim to have tackled the subject a mere six months ago, Rebecca Mercuri points out (on Dave Farber's IP list) that others have been thinking about internet voting for over a decade. She writes:

Internet systems indeed DO promise FAR LESS in the way of auditability (recounts) and anonymity (privacy) than do the paper and other manual systems presently in place. To promote the belief that Internet voting, in any way provides a SAFE VOTE, is wholly erroneous.

She has an intimidating collection of links to (mostly) academic papers on the subject on her Electronic Voting page.

And in conclusion The only viable form of government is perl-based: we need a bicamel legislature with an eclectoral college. Thank you and good night!

And now for something completely the same! A note from timothy: The next piece in our continuing Hellmouth Revisited series is online. Feel free to go read it.

This time, an astute reader points us to the place where Guido Van Rossum speaks out on the Python license issues recently posted about here on Slashdot, and an Everquest enthusiast points to the Official Word (well, chatroom response) to Everquest server emulators. Oh, and remember that CueCat scanner you picked up last week (and quickly wrote a Linux kernel driver for) -- did anyone at Radio Shack mention something about an embedded serial number? Hmmmm. I thought not. Good thing reverse engineering isn't yet a capital offense ...

That's one long and winding snake of an issue ... Kevin Reichard writes: "Since you covered the original issues surrounding Python licensing, you may also want to note that Guido van Rossum of PythonLabs has officially responded in a Linux Today interview. He has many interesting things to say."

Which things notably include: "The sad thing is that all of this is based on technicalities: Stallman agrees that Python is free software, but a technicality in the licenses prevents compatibility. The choice of law clause in the CNRI license, which is causing the incompatibility, is very common is software licenses, and CNRI doesn't want to drop it because the validity of the general disclaimers in the license may depend on it. At the same time, Stallman doesn't want to allow any choice of law clauses, because one could stipulate the law of "Unfreedonia" which might reverse the meaning of the GPL."

Abort, retry, fail, bend, fold, spindle, mutilate? L Fitzgerald Sjoberg writes: " A recent posting on the official EverQuest boards by a spokesperson for Verant states that even RUNNING an EverQuest emulator violates the EverQuest license agreement.

If the emulator is legal, and emulators seem to be making a lot of legal headway these days, doesn't this essentially amount to Verant forbidding you to use a competitor's product? Not a good sign, if you ask me."

"Sir! Sir! There's something wrong -- this knob goes up to eleven!" Signal 11 writes: "I took apart a cuecat and did a rundown of the circuit tracings on the board. What follows is a short summary of what I found. I'm working on putting together a schematic for it and hope to have it together within a couple weeks.

The cuecat is fairly simple. It uses a pair of infrared LEDs to direct light onto the sheet of paper with the barcode on it. It is then picked up by an IR detector, whose output is tuned by a single potentiometer (adjusted at time of manufacture, I would guess) and then fed into the analog input of a microprocessor. The detector is the same type one can pickup at radioshack. All you do is enclose it in a box and then make a pinhole at one end. Cheap, but it works well enough.

The microprocessor I haven't had time to put together a circuit from the specs provided by texas instruments to download the microcode out of it. It is also a matter of me not wanting to learn about microprocessors although I understand it is common in the industry.. I'm an analog guy. :) I suspect it is nothing more than running the output through a ACD (analog->digital) inside the microprocessor and then referencing the binary input with a list of values to produce the barcode string. After that, as has been previously noted, it is passed to an XOR algorithm, and then modulated to be fed out onto the PS/2 interface. There are a pair of transistors on the board near the outputs of the microprocessor - I suspect these are used to either boost the signal to run over the PS/2 interface (the microprocessor may not have enough power), or as part of an oscillator to get a clock for the processor. Until I finish tracing out the board paths, I can't say for sure.

Somewhere in the chip they probably set the serial number into the nvram, which is prepended to the output. The software does the rest. As has been demonstrated, there isn't much to do on the software side either - one could just create an indexed array containing scancodes. One might even be able to write a new key definition file under linux.. no programming required.

This is a really simple device. This is also probably why they were so concerned about competitors.. it wouldn't take them more than one afternoon with an EE and a microcode programmer to reverse-engineer it and produce their own. Then again, the device was probably designed in the same amount of time, likely by a random contractor. The reason it took me so long? I've been messing around with electronics for all of three months, so yes, I'm not a professional - I also haven't gotten into DSP technology yet, which is all the cuecat is. As always, if someone could provide me with a basic circuit for reading the contents of the processor's memory out, I'd appreciate it!

Anyway, DigitalConvergence - I'm waiting for my cease and desist now."

Here's another quick round of Napster updates! First off, LinuxParanoid wrote in to tell us about Napster reinstating a portion of the accounts removed by the Metallica-inspired crackdown. Grexnix shared at article at the Beeb about Madonna's record company threatening legal action against Napster because a single from her not-yet-released album was leaked onto the net. DanCentury wrote in to tell us about The Offspring selling Napster hats, shirts and stickers on their website. gmr2048 writes "For anyone who may have owned an old HP4020 or 6020 or a Phillips CDD2000 or CDD2600 check out this lawsuit settlement HP/Phillips was sued because of the lack of quality in these units. They have settled and you may be entitled to a repair/replacement or $200 (if you've disposed of your original burner)." Cool! Also, check out the Brunching Shuttlecocks' 'Napster of Puppets,' and 'Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Pirated Mp3s' at Modern Humorist.

Lets start this off with some homework: we were nominated for a 2000 Webby in Community. Please go vote for us (requires annoying login, but please do it anyway! I want a crappy little trophy!) Now with the 'biz outta the way, brainsik pointed us to the Brainshaker: a headmounted subwoofer that looks like it would make Quake a bit to real. Plastik noted a web filter guaranteed to offend the conservative and humorless. But it makes reading Slashdot damn entertaining. And if you're interesting in violating most religions, vkulkarn found an "Escort" who apparently reads Slashdot (will she go out with CowboyNeal?) Speaking of religion, Zippy noted that I am apparently a prophet in the Church of The Enlightenment , along with Jay Stile of Stileproject . Illiad, from Userfriendly.org is a bard. webword sent us CalculusGirls.com which combines 2 of the many things I don't understand. Andy Lester noted that Brunching Shuttlecocks has a book on "Fuzzy Logic Functions", in the style of O'Reilly. yek401 noted that his english professor builds barbie doll cyborgs: god bless tenure ;) Trenchcoat Steve warned us about Moon Land Registry which claims to be selling land on the moon for $10/acre: you even get a deed and mineral rights... and it might be legal! Gravey noted that their are two new Reboot movies going into production. For you conspiracy theorists, backtick noted that everyone's favorite software monopoly might be getting into the furniture biz along with Lazyboy. SgtPepper pointed us to RFC 2795 which "describes a protocol suite which supports an infinite number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters" ucsimon noted that LegoLand in California just gota liquor license. Mind you after a few shots of vodka, finding a 2x2 blue block takes a lot longer. Let's wrap up with jyuter's note that Comedy Central has vid clips of the south park kids doing Python's parrot sketch in Quicktime or Real.

Lets start this off with some homework: we were nominated for a 2000 Webby in Community. Please go vote for us (requires annoying login, but please do it anyway! I want a crappy little trophy!) Now with the 'biz outta the way, brainsik pointed us to the Brainshaker: a headmounted subwoofer that looks like it would make Quake a bit to real. Plastik noted a web filter guaranteed to offend the conservative and humorless. But it makes reading Slashdot damn entertaining. And if you're interesting in violating most religions, vkulkarn found an "Escort" who apparently reads Slashdot (will she go out with CowboyNeal?) Speaking of religion, Zippy noted that I am apparently a prophet in the Church of The Enlightenment , along with Jay Stile of Stileproject . Illiad, from Userfriendly.org is a bard. webword sent us CalculusGirls.com which combines 2 of the many things I don't understand. Andy Lester noted that Brunching Shuttlecocks has a book on "Fuzzy Logic Functions", in the style of O'Reilly. yek401 noted that his english professor builds barbie doll cyborgs: god bless tenure ;) Trenchcoat Steve warned us about Moon Land Registry which claims to be selling land on the moon for $10/acre: you even get a deed and mineral rights... and it might be legal! Gravey noted that their are two new Reboot movies going into production. For you conspiracy theorists, backtick noted that everyone's favorite software monopoly might be getting into the furniture biz along with Lazyboy. SgtPepper pointed us to RFC 2795 which "describes a protocol suite which supports an infinite number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters" ucsimon noted that LegoLand in California just gota liquor license. Mind you after a few shots of vodka, finding a 2x2 blue block takes a lot longer. Let's wrap up with jyuter's note that Comedy Central has vid clips of the south park kids doing Python's parrot sketch in Quicktime or Real.

Moo-ha-ha. CmdrTaco is on vacation (and sending his e-mail to /dev/null, so please don't even try), so I'm doing Quickies this week. On to the good stuff. DigitalDaedalus wrote in to tell us about the SGI 404 pages. Cute. For those with that not-so-fresh feeling, dodobh wrote in to tell us about the Slashdot Purity Test. No, I won't tell you my score. In the 'ear candy' bin, casret told us that they posted the results of the XMMS plugin contest. Time for some stuff from the 'exploding stuff' bin. Aardappel wrote in about Fisheye Quake, and Kintanon caught my eye with Fun With Grapes. Charles Helfenstein told us about the anti-cubicle. Very cool. Fanmail used the force and wrote in about George Lucas In Love. With all the X-Men hype going on, Link wrote in about Mutant Watch. Smurfy cared to share AIEEE, the Acronym Interaction, Expansion and Extrapolation Engine. fwfr told us about the Sim-William Shatner. You'll need Flash. Last but certainly not least, The Welcome Rain wrote in to tell us about your friend and mine, Robot Frank.

Quite a number of people recently, includingWrexSoul wrote to say "Are you tired of waiting for the judge's findings-of-law in the Microsoft case? There's a Mad Libs-like toy on Brunching Shuttlecocks where you can have some automatically generated for you by a pack of disgruntled Keebler Elves. " Boy, I sure am *verb* about *subject*

Quite a number of people recently, includingWrexSoul wrote to say "Are you tired of waiting for the judge's findings-of-law in the Microsoft case? There's a Mad Libs-like toy on Brunching Shuttlecocks where you can have some automatically generated for you by a pack of disgruntled Keebler Elves. " Boy, I sure am *verb* about *subject*

Finally home long enough to compile some quickies. option8 sent us the MacCrate which probably isn't up to code. Course neither is this one (thanks pkr) Speaking of cases, Deega sent us a site where you can get air brushed cases. rafa noted that Propaganda Volume 12 is out. UM_Maverick has started YALS called Linuxtopia.com pq wrote in with a picture that proves that a spell checker is probably a good idea. RoLlEr_CoAsTeR found something on Brunching Shuttlecocks which lets you combine Advertising and Perl: its actually extremely clever. Speaking of perl, ThePixel noted Perl Toys, which I think we mentioned a year or so ago, but with Christmas coming up, it probably is worth checking out again. Especially if you want magnetic poetry. Speaking of stuff to buy, JbirdUAH noted that Copyleft has Slashdot frisbees! Just in time for Winter! jhopson sent us a retelling of beowulf starring people you know. Lexie (who should really ask CowboyNeal out) sent us Eunuch which I'm not gonna explain, but its definitely wierd. motardo noted that Dalnet is for sale on eBay. Ant noted that Google seems to have an interesting result if you search for 'More evil than satan himself'. Speaking of evil, jsfetzik sent us Sinux the Linux for sinners. And how about Captain Zion's link to FsckU-FsckMe(tm) which is not for children, but is pretty amusing. Maybe you'll find auto.pron.org a little more wholesome. Finally, jetpack pointed us to Forum2000, which I'd never seen before, but am glad I did. It was mentioned in a comment awhile ago, and then we were assimilated. Super wierd.

Finally home long enough to compile some quickies. option8 sent us the MacCrate which probably isn't up to code. Course neither is this one (thanks pkr) Speaking of cases, Deega sent us a site where you can get air brushed cases. rafa noted that Propaganda Volume 12 is out. UM_Maverick has started YALS called Linuxtopia.com pq wrote in with a picture that proves that a spell checker is probably a good idea. RoLlEr_CoAsTeR found something on Brunching Shuttlecocks which lets you combine Advertising and Perl: its actually extremely clever. Speaking of perl, ThePixel noted Perl Toys, which I think we mentioned a year or so ago, but with Christmas coming up, it probably is worth checking out again. Especially if you want magnetic poetry. Speaking of stuff to buy, JbirdUAH noted that Copyleft has Slashdot frisbees! Just in time for Winter! jhopson sent us a retelling of beowulf starring people you know. Lexie (who should really ask CowboyNeal out) sent us Eunuch which I'm not gonna explain, but its definitely wierd. motardo noted that Dalnet is for sale on eBay. Ant noted that Google seems to have an interesting result if you search for 'More evil than satan himself'. Speaking of evil, jsfetzik sent us Sinux the Linux for sinners. And how about Captain Zion's link to FsckU-FsckMe(tm) which is not for children, but is pretty amusing. Maybe you'll find auto.pron.org a little more wholesome. Finally, jetpack pointed us to Forum2000, which I'd never seen before, but am glad I did. It was mentioned in a comment awhile ago, and then we were assimilated. Super wierd.

I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic! First lets get the serious quickies out of the way: chris sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia. Registration is open. Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned. k-rist sent us SimShatner. Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff. Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD. Want some Blair Witch Parodies? irishmikev sent is a Southpark Parody and stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project. How about a pair of strange places to put a server? Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box. If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more) Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice. and rjh pointed us to the iMaul (seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today) Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators. Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise, I gotta plug Think Geek which is the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever. We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great. ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.

Kris Kersey wrote in to mention that CompHardware.Com and running the Linux Hardware Database. Roast Beef wrote in to comment that AntiOnline's new AntiCode looks Strangely Familiar. Richard Finney sent us a nice picture of IO Transitioning Jupiter that has officially met Rob's First Law of Art (all art is better once it becomes my background image). Next up, a trio of Star Wars related stories: PhoneMonkey wrote in with proof that everyone has Star Wars fever over at The Onion. Danse writes wrote in to send us The Phantom Menace Revealed from the Brunching Shuttlecocks. Lars Westergren sent us Mr Cranky's top 10 reasons why you should be worried about the new "Star Wars" movie. [null] created the terribly flawed Slashdot Quota (he gives more points to quickee submittors than feature & book review writers, plus failed to give a million bonus points to anyone named CmdrTaco). An anonymous reader linked us to a suspended Linux server. Link wrote in to send us a little web slideshow that I can't explain, but its so odd that I had to share it. The Dude wrote in to tell us about the ideal use for that VAX 11/780 that you lying around. And finally for the paranoid, Cabby sent us a website which (I kid you not) is Everything Women need to know about Y2k. Sit in slack jawed amazement.

Jim Finnis writes "The Brunching Shuttlecocks have written an amusing allegory on software copyright, which you can find at their site. " It's a good bit. Definately worth a read.