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BSD And Politics
qbasicprogrammer writes: "At Daily Daemon News, Josh Pennell says the Reform Party's National Primary Online Election was constantly under attack during the 72-hour election window, however IOActive (the Reform Party's hosting service)'s OpenBSD server kept the kiddies and crackers away. According to the reader comments, Ralph Nader is using BSD/OS, as is the Libertarian Party Web site. It's nice to see political parties believe in freedom of software."
BSD/OS is definitely not BSD licensed -- it's a derivative of 4.4BSD that in its turn is a mix of BSD-licensed and other code. BSD-licensed subset of 4.4BSD (known as 4.4BSD-Lite) was used as the starting point for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, so all three are under BSD license now (to be formally correct I should add that they also contain utilities under GPL, X11, perl dual licensing and other Open Source licenses, however usable subset is under BSD license) while BSD/OS isn't.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Politicians do dictate everything no matter how much they do or don't know.
Bush selected Microsoft becouse in the Republican idiolog only the wealthyest corpration in America could produce the best operating system. Free is garbage and Bill Gates is the solution.
Al Gore selected Linux becouse the Democrats basic philosophy of people. Again not an informed tech choice but an idilog that matches the realitys.
Had Linus been rich and Gates poor Bush would have used Linux...
Had Windows been open sourced and Linux closed Al would have used Windows...
It's all idiolog... yes they live sleep eat breath and umm go to the bathroom.. in idilog.. they live what they speak. The become what they say. This allows them to get away with murder as even when covered in blood they embody the views others have. They need not even believe those ideas. Just live them... And with that the need not cover anything.
Bill Clinton was cought with an intern. Let's face it.. any moron can get away with an affare with a willing subordinate. That was a really sloppy coverup...
But we forgive him becouse he eat sleeps and breaths what we want him to believe. We'll never know if he believes a word of it. We do know he acts the part really well.
Thats the point....
No the os is going to be an idilog choice...
I'm supprised BSD was used... I'd be supprised of Solarus was used. Thies are better choices but don't match the idilogs as well as Linux or Windows.
By now my grandmother knows what Linux and Windows is. Not that she could make in informed tech choice. She'd say "I don't use computers" and thats her os choice... NONE...
In local political campaigns canidates will use oponents choice of operating system to sniff out political views...
You better belive it matters....
I don't actually exist.
Do they really? Or did they just happen to have some smart people around who were able to grab the best tool for this specific job.
Why am I not surprised?
b ush.com
0 00.com
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.georgew
www.georgewbush.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.algore2
www.algore2000.com is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.1pl2 secured_by_Raven/1.5.1 on Linux
I agree that this is not the only way (or even the best way) to choose a political affiliation.
However, if you want to know which party "gets" the Open Source movement, there's really only one answer.
You have your stories a bit wrong.
About 5 years ago, Theo left (to be nice) the NetBSD project to form OpenBSD. All of the BSDs borrow code from each other, but all also develop a lot of code themselves.
OpenBSD has more NetBSD code in it than FreeBSD, it anything, and all of that code undergoes a code -level audit before an OpenBSD release ships. This helps security and it helps stability (what better way to find bugs?)
There are two ways to tamper with an election (exept for the usual unholy game called election campaign)
a) You either try to cheat outright, replacing notes with "Guy X" printed on them with notes with "Guy Y" (or flood the booth with "Guy Y" votes, or rig the lists or counting) or
b) You disturb the election itself. Making it difficult for your opponents suspected supporters to vote.
Real life meatspace voting is not so easy to disturb. Sure, you can cause a lot of trouble, but to seriously affect the outcome of an election, you must have lots of people with you messing vith voting booths all over the country. That means to pull it off you must be big enough to be an important political factor anyway.
Online voting may be more sensitive to tampering than traditional voting since a single cracker, with or without a political agenda, might try to alter the results (method a) or simply DoS the voting server (method b).
Now the best way to counter this threat would be to large number of voting servers, each taking votes from a random subset of the population. This way one successful cracker attempt will be a nuisance, like a single bomb threat on election day, but will hardly have any affect on the overall results.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Maybe politicians just feel comfortable with the innocent looking devil logo?
PigPog.
Libertarians are NOT anti-poor. Libertarians don't want to throw people to the wolves. Libertarians believe the government IS the wolf!
Libertarians want to help the poor at the local level. They don't want the federal government taking all your money to Washington with the hope that they will give it back to your community.
If you believe the federal welfare state actually helps the poor, vote for some other party.
I'm sure if online voting were implemented in larger elections we would see a many more attacks, and from many more people. I'm sure there are plenty of other organizations that would to effect American (or any other nation for that matter) elections. I wonder if this won't be the biggest obstacle to online voting.
If we were to implement online voting in the US for a national election, I wonder if it would even be technically possible due to the sheer number of attacks sure to come.
On the other hand... I mean, is that really a good argument for you? That a politician is using a certain operating system for his campaign?
Like, you trust them?
Best regards,
January