EFF Announces 2004 Pioneer Award Winners

Christopher Soghoian writes "In an announcement earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has revealed the winners of the Thirteenth Annual Pioneer Awards. Focusing on the area of electronic voting security and accountability, they have highlighted the work of Kim Alexander, the president of the California Voter Foundation, David Dill, a Stanford Professor and founder of VerifiedVoting.org, and Avi Rubin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored the highly publicized Diebold report of 2003."

Comments

BENEDICT ARNOLDS OF THE OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT

[Anonymous Coward]

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2001-2004 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.

Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds all got rich off the Open Source Movement. What do you have to look forward to?

Dichotomy of Voting

[mfh]

There is a distinct dichotomy between the way voting should be handled, and the reality of the situation. Voting should be handled by the elderly ladies, with all their honesty and good faith, yet the gravity of the situation is that these ladies have become obsolete, due to the fact that they can easily be fooled now by those with a great deal of technological prowess. Sadly, these bastions of hope can't possibly keep up with the weasels who abuse power.

We need to utilize the honesty from these wonderful proctors, and harness that in whatever system of voting is brought forward. We need an auditing system that is open to the public, so that the votes can be quickly check-sum'd and factored by poll. Our votes should be accessible online so that we can check to make sure our vote has not been changed by wrong-doers.

Re:Dichotomy of Voting

[DarwinDan]

The reality of the situation is the fact that "e-Voting" technology will continue to progress and these ladies you speak of will continue to disappear.

It really is a sad fact (highlighted by the Diebold debacle) that there is little honesty left in the world of electronic voting. And, for that matter, even if a company is "honest" how can we be sure they aren't just doctoring their checksums or other statistics? *sigh*

The Future: bright, beautiful, and not here yet.

[LithiumX]

While electronic voting may be the way of the future, I'm a lot more inclined to be conservative about the entire process. We're in far too great a rush to revolutionize a system that has always had problems, and always will (in one form or another).
The recent near-tie's and questionable results are more a matter of our own political divisiveness and extreme political stances.
That, and a publicly-audited voting system dashes all my hopes of winning the 2012 elections by underhanded means.

The question everyone askls

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's Seth Finkelstein and Michael Sims with the Censorware project?

Johns Hopkins University

[JackPo]

I am going to stick my neck out there and congratulate Professor Rubin while condemning hopkins... Avi Rubin's name has been thrown around quite a bit recently due to the Diebold controversy and the shutdown of bell labs. However, I'm sure many of you know about the leaked Diebold memoes that were hosted by members of academia throughout the united states. It is probably most ironic that it was @ Hopkins that the administration FORCED a student to remove the memoes even over Professor Rubin's very vocal support of the student....