Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Diebold, Peroxide, Comdex
Diebold Election Systems Round 2 in MD zznate writes "Looks like Diebold is not going to get off the hook so easily in Maryland after all. For anyone local, feel free to contact delegates Hixson or Hollinger to express your support. Perhaps they could even receive a copy or two (or fifty ;-) of the documents listed here."
Diebold is having an easier time at Swarthmore. yoshi_mon writes "Previously reported on /. was the Swarthmore Students Effort to keep the Diebold leaked memo's online. However that effort has been quashed by one Dean Bob Gross. To quote the dean, "We can?t get out in front in this fight against Diebold." BlackBoxVoting.com reports that '[Swarthmore College] is not willing to take a strong stand against Diebold, and is systematically disabling the network access of any student who hosts the files.'"
AT&T says Ha, just kidding! An anonymous reader writes "In an update to an earlier Slashdot article, Telco giant AT&T rushed to withdraw two notices sent to business partners and customers asking for the IP addresses of all outbound SMTP servers because of a 'human error' gaffe."
All this and cheap shrimp cocktail. blackbearnh writes "While the topic has been raised, I thought I'd mention a few other things going on at COMDEX Open-Source wise.
First off, the Open Source and Linux track has been expanded from a half-dozen sessions last year to nearly twenty this year. These will cover everything from the basics of Open Source (taught by folks like Ken Coar of Apache) to an intro to PHP led by Rasmus Lerdorf.
On the show floor, a massive 2500 sq foot Open Source Innovation Center will serve as the site for hourly talks by Open Source evangelists on business-related topics such as case studios proving the benefits of Open Source. There will also be a staffed "clinic" area where attendees can get advice on what Open Source technologies would work well in their business. There will also be install parties held at noon each day, where attendees can bring their laptops to get help installing MySQL or Debian. And lastly, a .ORG village inside the center will host representitives from more than a dozen prominent Open Source organizations, including OpenOffice and Mozilla.
Also, the COMDEX/ApacheCon exchange program continues this year. COMDEX members can get access to the ApacheCon expo floor and BOF sessions, while ApacheCon member can visit the COMDEX show floor and the Open Source keynotes. Shuttle service will link the two conventions.
James Turner
Co-Chair, Open Source, Fall 2003 COMDEX"
It's a crapshoot, eh. Dick Faze writes " Royal Bank of Canada is part of a $50 Million investment in SCO: Has our communist neighbor to the north finally flipped completely?" (We know Mr. Faze is being facetious, here ... don't we?) This is the same $50,000,000 investment deal in which some people suspected Microsoft's involvment.
Patent Office Cancels Swing Patent An anonymous reader writes "Remember the swing patent issued last year covering the method of swinging a swing? Well, the Patent Office must've taken offense at the amount of criticism it received over this patent. It initiated a reexam proceeding and after a year's worth of reexamination, they cancelled the patent on July 1, 2003."
But all the other patents are up to snuff, don't worry.
Carmack's Peroxide Troubles Over? Rob Jellinghaus writes "John Carmack's aerospace company has had problems getting enough concentrated 90% peroxide for their engines. So they have been working on mixed monoprop engines that would need only 50% peroxide, which would pretty much end their fuel troubles for good. They have had many failures, but they may have just succeeded. In his words: 'This is Very Good.'"
Remember, most of the world is still dial-up, at best. Anothermouse Cowered writes "It's a router, it's a firewall, it's a home gateway it's a... In another giant leap for the Open Source community, you can now hack on your own embedded Linux system for under $70. The source code for the ActionTEC Dual modem previously mentioned on Slashdot ('Hacking the Actiontec 56k Modem/Gateway') in September has now been released under the GPL. Downloads available here."
Please do not spam these people with 50 11MB files. If each member of the slashdot crowd even sends one copy, their mail servers will be overwhelmed and our efforts will be ignored. Perhaps someone can print paper copies to send to them?
C:\>
The memos are available for download here. French server, decent bandwidth, out of the reach of any DMCA-wielding company.
Just want to note that the write up about Swarthmore Dean Bob Gross above is a bit harsh. As I understand (I was unable to go to the large meeting that where this was discussed), he decided that while what the students were doing was a bold and important step, the college just did not have the financial resources to fight what could be a protracted legal battle with a large company like Diebold, especially when organiziations like the EFF are already involved in the issue. And I can understand this.
But while the college is not formally supporting the students on this cause, they are not cutting off student's access or anything like that. Why-War? is hosted off-campus and is continuing to spread the memos around. Several people are getting in contact with other schools in an effort to spread them in a more underground, but still visible, way.
Check out more on it on Swarthmore's Daily Gazette. The Phoenix should have something up on this soon, too.
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
I swear, I was nowhere near that gaffe.
"We're an apex predator with the fecundity of a base level herbivore... We're a virus with shoes..." RazorJAK
Although the name may lead you to think otherwise, Royal is just another private bank. It's not affiliated with the Canadian gov't or anything. So, no, we haven't flipped completely.
The fact that it cut to the root of democracy, might have somethng to do with it!
Just a hunch
Help fight continental drift.
Everyone bemoans bad patents and the effect they can have on Open Source, but is there an effort to actually *do* anything about it?
One of the most obvious issues with software patents is cross-licensing. If IBM infringes on Intel's patents, Intel sues. IBM does a search, and counter-sues because Intel is infringing on umpteen IBM patents. Voila, a cross-licensing agreement is signed, no one gets sued, everyone's happy.
Needless to say, if an open source application unwittingly infringes on a patent (which is more likely over time), there is little recourse.
Shouldn't the EFF or the FSF be encouraging coders (particularly those doing cutting edge work) to submit "patentable" code much like they recommend assigning copyrights to them?
They should offer to do the patent search and submission in return for all licensing rights. This would give a central (hopefully benevolent) organization a "war chest" of patents for future lawsuit avoidance and cross-licensing.
Is this already being done?
With the amount of work going into Open Source, there must be tons of patentable code out there. Even if it's not patentable, it apparently doesn't really matter.
i saw rasmus lerdorf's intro to php at the mysql conference... he takes a whole different view to web development that makes java's claims of speed, stability, scalability ect almost moot.
java will say, php is bad because it can't do x as good as we can, and he will summarily explain why you would never want to do x and how php can solve whatever x's method was trying to solve just as fast.
very good speech.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
It's much more than the lure of the forbidden. These documents don't only expose insecurity of the system and the potential for massive vote fraud; they expose evidence of illegal tampering in one election, and a callous attitude (to be generous) toward the implications of these security flaws for the public interest. Even worse, Diebold's response to the revealed flaws in their system and procedures was not to respond to the issues raised but rather to issue cease-and-desist orders. This is fundamentally about the democratic process, and there are good reasons to mirror these documents. The ultimate irony - and the thing that really makes me want to vomit - is that Diebold is also the company responsible for protecting the original Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence.
I feel bad for you. How upsetting it must have been to take down the source code for a game which was blatantly stolen property just because some university bigwig said so. The parallels between preserving incriminating evidence against a company attempting to take and gain the power to arbitrarily decide all elections in the most powerful country in the world and hosting stolen source code for a video game are so strong I can taste them.
Or maybe you're just doing your part to make sure there's no HL3.
Asshole.
I'm a student at Swarthmore, and, in fact, the one who disabled access to the Diebold documents SCDC was hosting at scdc.sccs.swarthmore.edu . It was very unfortunate that we had to; I wish the college hadn't forced us to. That said--
What's not clear from all of the news coverage, is that while the college is indeed having to shut down hosts on campus for the documents, ITS here and the college itself is supportive of the students involved who are talking with EFF. The Deans are being helpful in suggesting legal routes for SCDC, but the College itself does *not* have the resources to get involved in a legal battle. Swarthmore is a very small school(1400) students, and just doesn't have the resources that larger institutions would to put towards legal expenses.
PLEASE go easy on Bob Gross's email; the administration at Swarthmore is very responsive to student needs, but there are limits as to what can be done. They're not bad people; they're doing what's best for the school.
Is Diebold getting off easy from Swarthmore? That has yet to be seen.
High concentration hydrogen peroxide all by itself makes a low performance, but very convenient, rocket propellant. All hydrogen peroxide is in solution with some amount of water, because even if you had 100% peroxide, some of it would start decomposing to water (and oxygen) as you stored it.
Drugstore peroxide is 3% concentration. If you pour it on a catalyst, like silver or platinum, you will see bubbles forming in the solution (released oxygen), and the liquid will get somewhat warmer due to the released energy. Above roughly 70% concentration, the heat released is enough to vaporize all the water content, so if you pass it through a good catalyst, you will get all gas coming out the other side, and gas can be accelerated through a rocket nozzle to produce thrust. At 70%, the gas is only just above the boiling point of water, but as the concentration goes up, the temperature goes up fast. 90% peroxide, the most common grade used for propulsion, produces gas at about 1400 F temperature. Going all the way to 98% peroxide, the highest concentration produced, gives a few hundred degrees more temperature, but at a significant price increase. Higher temperature lets you use less propellant for a given amount of thrust-time, because it maintains a given chamber pressure with a less dense, but hotter, mixture (a simplification).
"Real" rocket propellants have temperature several thousand degrees higher, which does indeed increase performance, but the engines have to be cooled, and you need to manage both a fuel and an oxidizer in some form. One of our fundamental system trades is that it is better for an X-Prize class vehicle to use a propellant that simplifies vehicle engineering, even if you have to use more of it.
We use 90% peroxide from a small specialty supplier for all of our flight vehicles, but they closed shop a while ago, and we haven't been able to come to terms with the only domestic supplier of 90% peroxide, FMC chemical corp. Because of this, we have been working on alternate propellant schemes for a good part of this year, in parallel with building the full size X-Prize vehicle. If we had been able to just buy 90% peroxide like we buy all of our other industrial chemicals, we never would have bothered with the research.
Just about every week, someone asks why we don't concentrate it ourselves. True, dozens of people have made a few gallons of high concentration peroxide at various times, but there have only been two large scale concentrators operated in the US outside of the official manufacturers - Rotary Rocket had a concentrator, but it only went to 85% concentration, and it didn't do purification, and Beal Aerospace had a large scale concentrator operational after the blew up their first one. Sure, we could figure out how to do it, but then we would be in the chemical plant business instead of the rocket business, and that's not what we want to do. I am funding an operator in Houston to produce a few thousand pounds of 90% for us, but he is six months behind schedule on delivery, which proves my point about it not being as simple as people think.
The direction we have been pursuing is using a combination of 50% peroxide, which is readily available through distributors from multiple manufacturers, and a small amount of miscible fuel (methanol in our current work). 50% peroxide by itself doesn't work as a rocket propellant, because you can't boil all the water, which makes even decomposing most of the peroxide difficult. Adding a fuel and (the tricky part!) getting it to burn with the released oxygen gives you the energy necessary to vaporize the water and get everything up to a high temperature. Mixing fuels with high concentration oxidizers usually makes a touchy and deadly explosive (we have intentionally detonated a mix of 90% peroxide and alcohol - Very Scary), but buffered with 50% water, and running off of stoichemetric mixture ratio, the risk is not very high. We have a study report from the Department of Mines in the late 50's investigating th