We've already paid for that. The U.S. Census Bureau's Tiger [sic] map database.
The TIGER files are a good place to start with a new mapping endeavor, but they are not an end unto themselves. A people's mapping project would do well to use a distributed approach that builds on what the TIGER files offers.
First, thanks for your response. I appreciate the feedback.
While it is true that the eVACS system does not provide a voter-verified audit trail, it is not quite accurate to say it is not an improvement over proprietary solutions. Non-proprietary code by itself is an improvement. External auditing and a compilation process provably free of trojans performed on digitally signed code, producing digitally signed binaries is an improvement.
I think it's important to distinguish for whom this could be an improvement. For you and the other members of your development team and the independant lab that tests the voting machines and their software--yes. But these groups are all using the machines in the capacity more like a home computer user is using their system at home. You and the lab can change whatever you wish and make the system suit your needs (either by doing it yourself or getting someone you trust to do it). This is where free software is a must-have and a definate advantage, no question about it. Signed binaries are of course helpful and necessary. I have no problem with these advances in this context.
But for the public at large, it's quite a different situation. For the public using the machine strictly to vote, I maintain there is no opportunity to check the software to make sure it all matches the digitally signed binaries. In other words, even if some version of the voting machine software is completely trustworthy, how would a voter determine if the voting machine they're about to use is running the trustworthy software? How would they determine if the software running on everyone else's voting machine is the trustworthy version (which they need to know in order to be assured most people's votes will count properly)? I know of no way to look at a screen and discern this information. Therefore I find no advantage to public scrutiny for voting software or signed binaries. I don't see an advantage to non-free software or signature-less binaries either.
I feel sorry for you and all the other voting machine makers out there because, as I see it, you're all in the same situation--this is a no-win situation for the public and you have the unenviable task of producing a secure system. Nobody outside the development process can really know what software is running on those machines. And that's assuming the machines are somehow incapable of being altered by local polling place operators.
What was not mentioned in the wired article was the fact that paper ballots were available for those who wanted them, so I didn't feel the need to chuck my job in protest.
Yet another black mark for the Wired article. This wouldn't have changed my opinion of your machines, but it would have given a different view of the election. The picture they paint makes it look like you either vote with eVACS or you don't vote at all (possibly there's an absentee system, but I'm not familiar with Australian election law).
As background, the main driver behind the eVACS system was to gain a faster, more accurate count using the complex hare-clark algorithm. The actual vote-collection software was mostly driven by a desire to allow blind and ilterate electors to vote in secret like anyone else.
Noble goals all, in particular working to make it possible for the blind and illiterate to vote without revealing their vote.
It may be true that the developers introduce similar bugs, errors, and design flaws.
That's not what I'm addressing.
The BIG difference though is that open systems allow for the PEOPLE of the country to look for those problems and verify that they are fixed. With proprietary systems, the people must trust the machine provider.
This is true only when you can be sure you are running the same software you inspected, such as downloading a free software program at home and running it at home. That is not the case with a voting machine because you don't control that machine even indirectly.
Voters cannot verify the software running on the voting machine. They can't reinstall the software to be sure only the trusted software is running on it and they can't inspect what's already installed to be sure it matches the trusted software from the website. The only software that counts for anything is the software installed on the voting machine at the time votes are taken or counted. Any other test is only useful to show how someone made a mistake. There is no guarantee that the trusted software you perused on a website is actually the code running in a voting machine.
Until someone has the ability to walk up to a computer and somehow determine the complete set of programs running on that computer at all times just by looking at the screen you will never have the assurance you claim. Not with free software, not with proprietary software. That is why this whole software issue is a red herring and a trap for/. computer geeks who think that sharing source code will fix all our electronic voting machine problems.
Actually, the FDP did expose the fraud, and actually uncovered over 30,000 additional voters denied the right to vote. It was in the news here last year.
Great so far--it would have been nice if this had been covered nationally or if the national Democrats used this to help educate the public circa 2002 (where the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress). It also would have been nice to hear Democrats nationally talking about this rather than harping on Nader (seeing as how the denied voters were collectively large enough to make the state and the election go the other way in 2000). But more to the point: Are these people's voting rights now correctly restored? Were they able to vote in the mid-term elections in 2002? Will they be allowed to vote in 2004?
I don't trust the Democratic or Republican national parties. So I won't vote for parties that hurt me, assuming my vote will be counted accurately at all.
Seriously, why don't we get/license the well working system that was put in place in Australia? Yes, its not domestically produced, but the source is there and can be verified.
Because there are serious problems with that system. The software issues are virtually a red herring and do not make their machines trustworthy. Although it seems ironic to some, the same issues exist with free software-operated and non-free software-operated voting machines. Wired revealed big problems with eVACS but buried the description of the problems midway into their article and then posted their eVACS article under a misleading headline which is probably why you reached the conclusion you did. I commented on this system in that thread and responded to one of the system's developers when the software trustworthiness question was raised.
The Australian system you refer to does not allow the voter to verify that their vote was recorded correctly and there is no permanent non-computer record of the votes to recount after the election. Even though the article quotes one of the system developers saying as much, this showstopper revelation is midway into the article and then apparently ignored for the purpose of writing the article's title. From the article:
The [eVACS] machine does not include a voter-verifiable receipt, something critics of U.S. systems want added to machines and voting machine makers have resisted.
A voter-verifiable receipt is a printout from the machine, allowing the voter to check the vote before depositing the receipt into a secure ballot box at the polling station. It can be used as a paper audit trail in case of a recount.
Green [Phillip Green, electoral commissioner for the Australian Capital territory] said the commission rejected the printout feature to keep expenses down. The system cost $125,000 to develop and implement. The printouts would have increased that cost significantly, primarily to pay for personnel to manage and secure the receipts and make sure voters didn't walk off with them.
Quinn, however, thinks all e-voting systems should offer a receipt. "There's no reason voters should trust a system that doesn't have it, and they shouldn't be asked to," he said.
"Why on earth should (voters) have to trust me -- someone with a vested interest in the project's success?" he said. "A voter-verified audit trail is the only way to 'prove' the system's integrity to the vast majority of electors, who after all, own the democracy."
As for the costs of securing and storing such receipts, Quinn said, "Did anyone ever say that democracy was meant to be cheap?"
There's no way to determine if only the software you trust is running on the machine you vote with. Your/. post is vastly overrated (+5 Insightful).
eVACS was first used in 2000, before the Diebold controversy erupted. So much for us trying to cash in on it.
I don't see how you could profit from Diebold's debacle unless people came away thinking you had a foolproof electronic voting solution we could use to replace Diebold voting machines. But that was not that the point of my question. It seems reasonable to me to wonder why the problems the article mentions were not considered showstoppers. Open Source voting software doesn't explain away all the problems clever people can think of to rig even one of your voting machines. One company looking to promote another company in which they have a financial relationship is reasonable thing to ask about. I'm glad to hear you tell us this is not the case.
Finally, if you think the system's out to bamboozle people - why not tell us exactly how?
That's the point--it's impossible to do that because the only software worth checking is the software actually running in each and every one of the voting machines and any software that tabulates votes across machines.
There's no way I can tell the software posted on your website is the same software running in each of those machines on voting day. This makes the posted software only useful to point out hypothetical problems. Nobody has the ability to walk up to one of these voting machines and determine that only trustworthy software is running on it. This problem exists whether the machines are running on proprietary software (like on Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia's machines) or if complete system source code is available under the most liberal terms.
An independant lab "fact-checked our asses", you can too.
Great, but I don't trust the lab by default. And I don't know if anyone was able to alter the software on the machines before or while the votes were collected and counted. I'm not saying you're devious like Diebold apparently is, I'm looking at what happened in Diebold's case and I'm becoming curious--the leaked Diebold e-mails suggest Diebold was able to alter the software after certification. Could the same thing happen to eVACS?
The whole software questions in this debate are a red herring. In the context of voting software for polling place elections, nobody's voting software provides real accountability.
I want a voting system that doesn't introduce more ambiguities into voting than we already have. I am willing to trade away speed in exchange for accuracy, accountability, and voter verification. What I want essentially acts as an end-run around inherently untrustworthy electronic voting machines: I want for each voter to have the opportunity to verify for themselves that their vote was recorded accurately and for that record of the vote to be countable after the election is declared over and the results are announced. This requires a permanent non-electronic record.
I think we need to somehow get "one of us" on one of these news programs to help "the masses" see that there is really an important battle coming in the very, very near future.
I do this every other week albeit on community radio, not television. I host a show called Digital Citizen on WEFT 90.1 FM every other Wednesday night from 8-10p. If you happen to be in the Champaign, IL area I invite you to tune in. When I get the means, I plan to record the show and make it available somewhere online for download, streaming, and sharing.
Your backwards explanation is a good example of how the phrase "intellectual property" has worked to muddle people's understanding of copyright and patent law.
Whatever you think you know about copyright law probably isn't true about patent law--they cover different things, the power one gains lasts for different amounts of time, they are acquired in different ways, they cost different amounts of money to acquire, they also cost different amounts of money to keep. What little they have in common pales in comparison to how much they differ. Copyrights and patents can even conflict--the power you would gain as a copyright holder if you wrote an MP3 player to distribute your program as you saw fit, would be trumped by Thomson's patent on MP3.
"Interestingly they used a 3-year-old KDE 1.x desktop. These older icons are made available under a public domain licence."
There is no such thing as "a public domain license". Putting a copyrighted work in the public domain means forgoing all copyright power for that work. Licenses, by contrast, tell you what you what the terms are for activities regulated by copyright law. Licensed works are still under copyright.
When I read the KDE art site pointed to by dot.kde.org's article, I can't find the phrase "public domain". There is language that suggests the copyright holders tried to do something similar ("The images inside this directory are COMPLETELY FREE for commercial and non-commercial use." emphasis theirs). To be clear, when you mean the work is in the public domain, say the work is in the public domain. The Creative Commons makes doing this easy now (if you're talking about US copyright law).
Don't kid yourself: open source is nice, but it doesn't guarantee a fault-proof or secure voting system (suppose somebody installs wrong or malicious software on one of the machines?).
I don't see how this Australian system is any more trustworthy than Diebold, ES&S, or Sequoia's systems (the latter three are all based on proprietary software). There's no voter verifiable audit trail (which is a showstopper) and yet, to read the review in the article, Software Improvements has apparently bamboozled people into trusting their work.
It looks like this Wired article gives an unjustified glowing review to a system whose accuracy can never be tested after the election. It looks to me like the reviewer (like so many programmers) gets caught up in the software being available for inspection.
If someone wanted to rig an election, they'd be wise to do what this Australian firm is doing: go through the motions to gain people's trust and then make sure there's no accountability in the system so nobody can second-guess your results (the firm even talks about how there's no voter verifiable audit trail because it is unneeded and not required by the 1992 voting law). We are fortunate Diebold has been so brazen about propping up President Bush and so hamfisted about stopping the leaked memos from propagating. Their actions give opponents a chance to be heard and say what a good voting system needs in order to be worthy of our trust.
How did this article overlook these glaring faults and conclude these "Aussies [are] do[ing] it right"? Is there some kind of financial relationship between Wired's owners (Conde Nast publications) and the Australian voting company?
Don't rely on someone else to keep your computer secure. Take steps yourself.
That's why I find free software to be superior to non-free software. With non-free software you must "rely on someone else to keep your computer secure" because only one person or organization has the source code and the legal authority to improve the software. If a program is Free Software for me, I get to choose how much time am I willing to spend developing the skill to improve my software to suit my needs. It doesn't matter to society how much of that freedom I leverage, what matters is that I have the freedom. But I want that freedom for everyone else too. I benefit from more people having these freedoms because I benefit when those people leverage those freedoms in clever ways.
This is also where I somewhat part with the Open Source movement. On the one hand, I'm glad for all the attention they've helped bring to Free Software licenses (particularly the GNU GPL), but on the other hand I (as a user) want the freedom to share and modify software. I'm not against businesses having the freedoms of Free Software, but I don't want to tailor my message for them or pitch chiefly to them. The GNU project tells about an interesting episode in their their essay on the difference between Free Software and Open Source:
At a trade show in late 1998, dedicated to the operating system often referred to as ``Linux'', the featured speaker was an executive from a prominent software company. He was probably invited on account of his company's decision to ``support'' that system. Unfortunately, their form of ``support'' consists of releasing non-free software that works with the system--in other words, using our community as a market but not contributing to it.
He said, ``There is no way we will make our product open source, but perhaps we will make it `internal' open source. If we allow our customer support staff to have access to the source code, they could fix bugs for the customers, and we could provide a better product and better service.'' (This is not an exact quote, as I did not write his words down, but it gets the gist.)
People in the audience afterward told me, ``He just doesn't get the point.'' But is that so? Which point did he not get?
He did not miss the point of the Open Source movement. That movement does not say users should have freedom, only that allowing more people to look at the source code and help improve it makes for faster and better development. The executive grasped that point completely; unwilling to carry out that approach in full, users included, he was considering implementing it partially, within the company.
The point that he missed is the point that ``open source'' was designed not to raise: the point that users deserve freedom.
stratjakt wrote:
No, you don't need perfect code. Linux has no "perfect code". If it did, Linus et al would be finished and have moved on to other things.
Nothing is perfect, so arguing about our need for perfection seems to me to be a moot point. I think we need a system to give as many people the freedoms to inspect, share, and modify software so software can meet people's needs. The proprietary model of software development and distribution does not give us these freedoms.
If you want to compete with Free Software, the only way you can truly compete is at the cost of use level.
From the accounts I've read so far, this sounds to me like a setup to fail--they're not talking about competing with Free Software at all, they're talking about competing with Open Source. And as we all know, Open Source doesn't speak to the same concerns as Free Software. "Free Software" talks to all computer users about the freedoms to share and modify software (essentially a social movement) while "Open Source" doesn't talk about software freedom. Instead, "Open Source" talks chiefly to businesses about faster, cheaper, and less buggy software development (essentially a development methodology).
If you only talk about the cost of this or that you ignore the salient freedoms that make Free Software more attractive over non-free software. I would never want to trade in my freedom of leveraging a world of skilled developers for the cost of buying into a monopoly (as all proprietary software is). I also place a high value on being able to run the same system on many different computers simply by installing another copy of that system. I wouldn't be as effective doing my business without the freedoms to share and modify software. I can't help but wonder what set of factors this study will consider since, from what I've seen so far, they appear to place no value on software freedom. I look forward to reading the completed study.
Stupid patents are not arguments against IP in general.
Using the term "IP" or "intellectual property" in that context prejudices one of the most important discussions society needs to have about how to handle policy in copyright, patent, trademark, mask rights, and all the other diverse laws that phrase lumps together. That term makes it seem like there's one overarching principal which is being reapplied for different kinds of works, but that's not so. Some of the areas covered even conflict (patents and copyrights, for instance, conflict for any developer or would-be user of a free software MP3 player in countries that observe software patents. Thomson's extant patent claim on MP3 conflicts with the power a copyright holder has to distribute their work).
Getting back to the topic at hand--software patents--these are completely unnecessary and one need not look back very far in computing history to see why: these patents did not exist when computing was starting up. Many corporations invested in personal computing without leveraging these patents. Therefore, we don't need them. We have them because corporations want to guarantee profit for working less.
Don't give into false dichotomies and ignorance.
on
Who Needs Radio?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Now, draw up sides, and... engage!
Cute--but I hope this doesn't give anyone the idea that it's okay to mentally disengage; to think of everyone as fitting into the false dichotomy you present then feel smug about being somehow above the fray. People who come away with that impression are often the people who should be challenged to think more critically.
It is valuable to provide yourself with a deeper understanding of the power to frame a debate. I've learned this first-hand by getting involved at a low-power community radio station (WEFT 90.1 FM -- I host "Digital Citizen"). I encourage everyone to get involved in their community radio stations (or start one).
Government subsidizes corporate radio.
on
Who Needs Radio?
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· Score: 1
Paypal link my ass, they [National Public Radio] have the federal government subsidising their FUD. Go here [KFI640 AM] for real talk radio.
Considering that the US Government gives away so much of the bandwidth in our allegedly publicly owned airwaves to corporations, I'd say the federal government is subsidizing Clear Channel stations too (including your "real talk" KFI640 AM). If you would like to learn who owns what station, become "Well Connected" and learn who controls what you hear.
RH [RedHat] decided to fuck all of their loyal follwers and concentrate on their "corporate" customers.
I don't understand your anger here--RedHat
is apparently contributing to the Fedora project (bandwidth, hosting, and software Fedora is building on, to name three things); it looks like Fedora and RH are working together to bring us the next revision of what used to be RedHat's GNU/Linux distribution.
will still be subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License. Their changes stand to benefit the community, just like anyone else who distributes a modified version of a GPL-covered work. RH appears to me to be making money from corporate customers and turning some of that revenue into free software for everyone.
RH has shown they want to work with the free software community even on issues where other businesses do not (such as software patents which poses a powerful threat to free software development in any country where software patents are allowed).
I don't see how RedHat's "loyal followers" are being "fuck[ed]" by moving the distribution more under the control of Fedora.
Proprietary software is hard to learn from.
on
PDF Writers?
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· Score: 1
The questioner asked to:
[...]
investigate other OpenSource PDF writers as well. Do you know of any other PDF writers, that I can utilize or learn from by looking at the source-code?"
Your reply discussed "[...] a (non-open-source, ad-supported) application [...]". I don't understand how this answers the question asked.
A couple interesting stories from our past and our present along these lines:
The 1960 and 1970 US Census tract level data (tract level means a subdivision of a county) are available only in a proprietary compressed format. This is because the US Government hired a programming firm (Dualabs) to write a compression scheme to be used on this census data. Dualabs wrote the program, compressed the data, and distributed the decompressor program. Census data archivists around the country only got the compressed version of the data. The US Government never made it a point to get the complete corresponding source code to that decompressor program, nor did they get a license to share and modify the program (which would have required source code to do well). The computers people initally used with the decompressor program became outmoded and the decompressor program only ran on that obsolete platform.
Dualabs went out of business in 1974. Therefore, we, the public, paid for Census data we cannot completely read even to this day without reverse engineering the compressed data format. Census data is unarguably important and few people know about this lack of foresight on the part of the US Government and Dualabs. This story has many lessons, most of which still have not been learned.
Recently the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign switched from using 5 web-based programs to do class-related stuff online (display student's grades, allow students to receive class material, discuss class projects with each other, etc.). Not long ago, UIUC dropped support for all of these programs and began supporting only Illinois Compass ("powered by WebCT Vista", as the program's proprietors tell us). Illinois Compass is non-free software and costs UIUC one million dollars a year (which UIUC is paying).
UIUC is widely known for having talented software programmers and a highly regarded college of engineering. For orders of magnitude less than $1M/yr UIUC could have paid a few students to leverage the huge pool of capable, tested, and time-honored Free Software out there in order to make a web-based bulletin board system to replace the 5 programs UIUC dropped support for. Now, with Illinois Compass, UIUC pays a team of local support staff (on top of the $1M/yr program fee) to support the new program. UIUC has no source code for Illinois Compass (let alone a license allowing them to share and modify the program). So now UIUC risks running into the same problem the US Government ran into should the proprietor's support for Illinois Compass disappear.
Sometimes these lessons take a long time to learn and cost the public a lot of money.
Yes, Richard Stallman has done great things. But he should be happy that he has brought truly "Free" computing to the masses, not worry about branding. His efforts would be much better spent convincing developers to use the GNU license instead of other licenses.
As people listen more to Linus Torvalds and the Open Source movement, they learn to identify with practical considerations that are not necessarily true (not all "Open Source" software is better than its proprietary counterparts) and they ignore or eschew software freedom. Paying attention to software freedom and how copyright law really works are two big reasons why the GNU GPL (the most popular license used amongst both Free Software and Open Source movements) can withstand the attacks from those who want to make non-free derivatives. If the SCO case goes to court and things go as so many Slashdotters seem to expect, it will be a victory of substance for the people and ideas Torvalds (and many Slashdotters) don't pay much heed to.
The attention the Linux kernel and the Open Source Initiative have brought to the GPL are appreciated, but they are not the people (or organization) that pay attention to social and ethical problems we computer users need to understand and fight against.
I don't mind anyone improving their work. What I mind is being kept from making my own improvements (or having the opportunity to have improvements made for me), distributing those improvements to my friends, making copies of software, and running programs any time I want. Hence, I view all proprietary software as a problem, not just Microsoft Windows. Proprietary software is a significant part of the way in which proprietors push for control over your data and how you use your computer (i.e., DRM, forced upgrades, prevention of reverse engineering, just to name a few).
Microsoft Windows happens to be some of the most widely used proprietary software available so it receives a lot of attention.
And being uncompressed is a huge problem. Using AIFF is going to suck your battery dead.
Which makes it all the more unfortunate the iPod software is non-free. Perhaps if it ran on free software someone could have added support for a lossless compression codec to it.
Slashdot Mirror
The TIGER files are a good place to start with a new mapping endeavor, but they are not an end unto themselves. A people's mapping project would do well to use a distributed approach that builds on what the TIGER files offers.
First, thanks for your response. I appreciate the feedback.
I think it's important to distinguish for whom this could be an improvement. For you and the other members of your development team and the independant lab that tests the voting machines and their software--yes. But these groups are all using the machines in the capacity more like a home computer user is using their system at home. You and the lab can change whatever you wish and make the system suit your needs (either by doing it yourself or getting someone you trust to do it). This is where free software is a must-have and a definate advantage, no question about it. Signed binaries are of course helpful and necessary. I have no problem with these advances in this context.
But for the public at large, it's quite a different situation. For the public using the machine strictly to vote, I maintain there is no opportunity to check the software to make sure it all matches the digitally signed binaries. In other words, even if some version of the voting machine software is completely trustworthy, how would a voter determine if the voting machine they're about to use is running the trustworthy software? How would they determine if the software running on everyone else's voting machine is the trustworthy version (which they need to know in order to be assured most people's votes will count properly)? I know of no way to look at a screen and discern this information. Therefore I find no advantage to public scrutiny for voting software or signed binaries. I don't see an advantage to non-free software or signature-less binaries either.
I feel sorry for you and all the other voting machine makers out there because, as I see it, you're all in the same situation--this is a no-win situation for the public and you have the unenviable task of producing a secure system. Nobody outside the development process can really know what software is running on those machines. And that's assuming the machines are somehow incapable of being altered by local polling place operators.
Yet another black mark for the Wired article. This wouldn't have changed my opinion of your machines, but it would have given a different view of the election. The picture they paint makes it look like you either vote with eVACS or you don't vote at all (possibly there's an absentee system, but I'm not familiar with Australian election law).
Noble goals all, in particular working to make it possible for the blind and illiterate to vote without revealing their vote.
That's not what I'm addressing.
This is true only when you can be sure you are running the same software you inspected, such as downloading a free software program at home and running it at home. That is not the case with a voting machine because you don't control that machine even indirectly.
Voters cannot verify the software running on the voting machine. They can't reinstall the software to be sure only the trusted software is running on it and they can't inspect what's already installed to be sure it matches the trusted software from the website. The only software that counts for anything is the software installed on the voting machine at the time votes are taken or counted. Any other test is only useful to show how someone made a mistake. There is no guarantee that the trusted software you perused on a website is actually the code running in a voting machine.
Many voting machines have their software changed during voting day (illegally, perhaps, but it still happens).
Until someone has the ability to walk up to a computer and somehow determine the complete set of programs running on that computer at all times just by looking at the screen you will never have the assurance you claim. Not with free software, not with proprietary software. That is why this whole software issue is a red herring and a trap for /. computer geeks who think that sharing source code will fix all our electronic voting machine problems.
Great so far--it would have been nice if this had been covered nationally or if the national Democrats used this to help educate the public circa 2002 (where the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress). It also would have been nice to hear Democrats nationally talking about this rather than harping on Nader (seeing as how the denied voters were collectively large enough to make the state and the election go the other way in 2000). But more to the point: Are these people's voting rights now correctly restored? Were they able to vote in the mid-term elections in 2002? Will they be allowed to vote in 2004?
When Greg Palast revealed that 64,000 Floridian voters were denied the ability to vote in the 2000 US Presidential election, what did the Democrats do to restore their voting rights? What did the Democrats do to verify Palast's story and expose Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris' fraud?
I don't trust the Democratic or Republican national parties. So I won't vote for parties that hurt me, assuming my vote will be counted accurately at all.
Because there are serious problems with that system. The software issues are virtually a red herring and do not make their machines trustworthy. Although it seems ironic to some, the same issues exist with free software-operated and non-free software-operated voting machines. Wired revealed big problems with eVACS but buried the description of the problems midway into their article and then posted their eVACS article under a misleading headline which is probably why you reached the conclusion you did. I commented on this system in that thread and responded to one of the system's developers when the software trustworthiness question was raised.
The Australian system you refer to does not allow the voter to verify that their vote was recorded correctly and there is no permanent non-computer record of the votes to recount after the election. Even though the article quotes one of the system developers saying as much, this showstopper revelation is midway into the article and then apparently ignored for the purpose of writing the article's title. From the article:
There's no way to determine if only the software you trust is running on the machine you vote with. Your /. post is vastly overrated (+5 Insightful).
I don't see how you could profit from Diebold's debacle unless people came away thinking you had a foolproof electronic voting solution we could use to replace Diebold voting machines. But that was not that the point of my question. It seems reasonable to me to wonder why the problems the article mentions were not considered showstoppers. Open Source voting software doesn't explain away all the problems clever people can think of to rig even one of your voting machines. One company looking to promote another company in which they have a financial relationship is reasonable thing to ask about. I'm glad to hear you tell us this is not the case.
That's the point--it's impossible to do that because the only software worth checking is the software actually running in each and every one of the voting machines and any software that tabulates votes across machines.
There's no way I can tell the software posted on your website is the same software running in each of those machines on voting day. This makes the posted software only useful to point out hypothetical problems. Nobody has the ability to walk up to one of these voting machines and determine that only trustworthy software is running on it. This problem exists whether the machines are running on proprietary software (like on Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia's machines) or if complete system source code is available under the most liberal terms.
Great, but I don't trust the lab by default. And I don't know if anyone was able to alter the software on the machines before or while the votes were collected and counted. I'm not saying you're devious like Diebold apparently is, I'm looking at what happened in Diebold's case and I'm becoming curious--the leaked Diebold e-mails suggest Diebold was able to alter the software after certification. Could the same thing happen to eVACS?
The whole software questions in this debate are a red herring. In the context of voting software for polling place elections, nobody's voting software provides real accountability.
I want a voting system that doesn't introduce more ambiguities into voting than we already have. I am willing to trade away speed in exchange for accuracy, accountability, and voter verification. What I want essentially acts as an end-run around inherently untrustworthy electronic voting machines: I want for each voter to have the opportunity to verify for themselves that their vote was recorded accurately and for that record of the vote to be countable after the election is declared over and the results are announced. This requires a permanent non-electronic record.
I do this every other week albeit on community radio, not television. I host a show called Digital Citizen on WEFT 90.1 FM every other Wednesday night from 8-10p. If you happen to be in the Champaign, IL area I invite you to tune in. When I get the means, I plan to record the show and make it available somewhere online for download, streaming, and sharing.
For those of us who want only Free Software, what wireless hardware works with Free Software drivers?
Your backwards explanation is a good example of how the phrase "intellectual property" has worked to muddle people's understanding of copyright and patent law.
Whatever you think you know about copyright law probably isn't true about patent law--they cover different things, the power one gains lasts for different amounts of time, they are acquired in different ways, they cost different amounts of money to acquire, they also cost different amounts of money to keep. What little they have in common pales in comparison to how much they differ. Copyrights and patents can even conflict--the power you would gain as a copyright holder if you wrote an MP3 player to distribute your program as you saw fit, would be trumped by Thomson's patent on MP3.
dot.kde.org's news entry claims
There is no such thing as "a public domain license". Putting a copyrighted work in the public domain means forgoing all copyright power for that work. Licenses, by contrast, tell you what you what the terms are for activities regulated by copyright law. Licensed works are still under copyright.
When I read the KDE art site pointed to by dot.kde.org's article, I can't find the phrase "public domain". There is language that suggests the copyright holders tried to do something similar ("The images inside this directory are COMPLETELY FREE for commercial and non-commercial use." emphasis theirs). To be clear, when you mean the work is in the public domain, say the work is in the public domain. The Creative Commons makes doing this easy now (if you're talking about US copyright law).
Is $780,000 a high enough fine to make AT&T stop violating the law?
I don't see how this Australian system is any more trustworthy than Diebold, ES&S, or Sequoia's systems (the latter three are all based on proprietary software). There's no voter verifiable audit trail (which is a showstopper) and yet, to read the review in the article, Software Improvements has apparently bamboozled people into trusting their work.
It looks like this Wired article gives an unjustified glowing review to a system whose accuracy can never be tested after the election. It looks to me like the reviewer (like so many programmers) gets caught up in the software being available for inspection.
If someone wanted to rig an election, they'd be wise to do what this Australian firm is doing: go through the motions to gain people's trust and then make sure there's no accountability in the system so nobody can second-guess your results (the firm even talks about how there's no voter verifiable audit trail because it is unneeded and not required by the 1992 voting law). We are fortunate Diebold has been so brazen about propping up President Bush and so hamfisted about stopping the leaked memos from propagating. Their actions give opponents a chance to be heard and say what a good voting system needs in order to be worthy of our trust.
How did this article overlook these glaring faults and conclude these "Aussies [are] do[ing] it right"? Is there some kind of financial relationship between Wired's owners (Conde Nast publications) and the Australian voting company?
That's why I find free software to be superior to non-free software. With non-free software you must "rely on someone else to keep your computer secure" because only one person or organization has the source code and the legal authority to improve the software. If a program is Free Software for me, I get to choose how much time am I willing to spend developing the skill to improve my software to suit my needs. It doesn't matter to society how much of that freedom I leverage, what matters is that I have the freedom. But I want that freedom for everyone else too. I benefit from more people having these freedoms because I benefit when those people leverage those freedoms in clever ways.
This is also where I somewhat part with the Open Source movement. On the one hand, I'm glad for all the attention they've helped bring to Free Software licenses (particularly the GNU GPL), but on the other hand I (as a user) want the freedom to share and modify software. I'm not against businesses having the freedoms of Free Software, but I don't want to tailor my message for them or pitch chiefly to them. The GNU project tells about an interesting episode in their their essay on the difference between Free Software and Open Source:
stratjakt wrote:
Nothing is perfect, so arguing about our need for perfection seems to me to be a moot point. I think we need a system to give as many people the freedoms to inspect, share, and modify software so software can meet people's needs. The proprietary model of software development and distribution does not give us these freedoms.
From the accounts I've read so far, this sounds to me like a setup to fail--they're not talking about competing with Free Software at all, they're talking about competing with Open Source. And as we all know, Open Source doesn't speak to the same concerns as Free Software. "Free Software" talks to all computer users about the freedoms to share and modify software (essentially a social movement) while "Open Source" doesn't talk about software freedom. Instead, "Open Source" talks chiefly to businesses about faster, cheaper, and less buggy software development (essentially a development methodology).
If you only talk about the cost of this or that you ignore the salient freedoms that make Free Software more attractive over non-free software. I would never want to trade in my freedom of leveraging a world of skilled developers for the cost of buying into a monopoly (as all proprietary software is). I also place a high value on being able to run the same system on many different computers simply by installing another copy of that system. I wouldn't be as effective doing my business without the freedoms to share and modify software. I can't help but wonder what set of factors this study will consider since, from what I've seen so far, they appear to place no value on software freedom. I look forward to reading the completed study.
Using the term "IP" or "intellectual property" in that context prejudices one of the most important discussions society needs to have about how to handle policy in copyright, patent, trademark, mask rights, and all the other diverse laws that phrase lumps together. That term makes it seem like there's one overarching principal which is being reapplied for different kinds of works, but that's not so. Some of the areas covered even conflict (patents and copyrights, for instance, conflict for any developer or would-be user of a free software MP3 player in countries that observe software patents. Thomson's extant patent claim on MP3 conflicts with the power a copyright holder has to distribute their work).
Getting back to the topic at hand--software patents--these are completely unnecessary and one need not look back very far in computing history to see why: these patents did not exist when computing was starting up. Many corporations invested in personal computing without leveraging these patents. Therefore, we don't need them. We have them because corporations want to guarantee profit for working less.
Cute--but I hope this doesn't give anyone the idea that it's okay to mentally disengage; to think of everyone as fitting into the false dichotomy you present then feel smug about being somehow above the fray. People who come away with that impression are often the people who should be challenged to think more critically.
It is valuable to provide yourself with a deeper understanding of the power to frame a debate. I've learned this first-hand by getting involved at a low-power community radio station (WEFT 90.1 FM -- I host "Digital Citizen"). I encourage everyone to get involved in their community radio stations (or start one).
Considering that the US Government gives away so much of the bandwidth in our allegedly publicly owned airwaves to corporations, I'd say the federal government is subsidizing Clear Channel stations too (including your "real talk" KFI640 AM). If you would like to learn who owns what station, become "Well Connected" and learn who controls what you hear.
I don't understand your anger here--RedHat
I don't see how RedHat's "loyal followers" are being "fuck[ed]" by moving the distribution more under the control of Fedora.
The questioner asked to:
Your reply discussed "[...] a (non-open-source, ad-supported) application [...]". I don't understand how this answers the question asked.
A couple interesting stories from our past and our present along these lines:
The 1960 and 1970 US Census tract level data (tract level means a subdivision of a county) are available only in a proprietary compressed format. This is because the US Government hired a programming firm (Dualabs) to write a compression scheme to be used on this census data. Dualabs wrote the program, compressed the data, and distributed the decompressor program. Census data archivists around the country only got the compressed version of the data. The US Government never made it a point to get the complete corresponding source code to that decompressor program, nor did they get a license to share and modify the program (which would have required source code to do well). The computers people initally used with the decompressor program became outmoded and the decompressor program only ran on that obsolete platform.
Dualabs went out of business in 1974. Therefore, we, the public, paid for Census data we cannot completely read even to this day without reverse engineering the compressed data format. Census data is unarguably important and few people know about this lack of foresight on the part of the US Government and Dualabs. This story has many lessons, most of which still have not been learned.
Recently the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign switched from using 5 web-based programs to do class-related stuff online (display student's grades, allow students to receive class material, discuss class projects with each other, etc.). Not long ago, UIUC dropped support for all of these programs and began supporting only Illinois Compass ("powered by WebCT Vista", as the program's proprietors tell us). Illinois Compass is non-free software and costs UIUC one million dollars a year (which UIUC is paying).
UIUC is widely known for having talented software programmers and a highly regarded college of engineering. For orders of magnitude less than $1M/yr UIUC could have paid a few students to leverage the huge pool of capable, tested, and time-honored Free Software out there in order to make a web-based bulletin board system to replace the 5 programs UIUC dropped support for. Now, with Illinois Compass, UIUC pays a team of local support staff (on top of the $1M/yr program fee) to support the new program. UIUC has no source code for Illinois Compass (let alone a license allowing them to share and modify the program). So now UIUC risks running into the same problem the US Government ran into should the proprietor's support for Illinois Compass disappear.
Sometimes these lessons take a long time to learn and cost the public a lot of money.
As people listen more to Linus Torvalds and the Open Source movement, they learn to identify with practical considerations that are not necessarily true (not all "Open Source" software is better than its proprietary counterparts) and they ignore or eschew software freedom. Paying attention to software freedom and how copyright law really works are two big reasons why the GNU GPL (the most popular license used amongst both Free Software and Open Source movements) can withstand the attacks from those who want to make non-free derivatives. If the SCO case goes to court and things go as so many Slashdotters seem to expect, it will be a victory of substance for the people and ideas Torvalds (and many Slashdotters) don't pay much heed to.
The attention the Linux kernel and the Open Source Initiative have brought to the GPL are appreciated, but they are not the people (or organization) that pay attention to social and ethical problems we computer users need to understand and fight against.
I don't mind anyone improving their work. What I mind is being kept from making my own improvements (or having the opportunity to have improvements made for me), distributing those improvements to my friends, making copies of software, and running programs any time I want. Hence, I view all proprietary software as a problem, not just Microsoft Windows. Proprietary software is a significant part of the way in which proprietors push for control over your data and how you use your computer (i.e., DRM, forced upgrades, prevention of reverse engineering, just to name a few).
Microsoft Windows happens to be some of the most widely used proprietary software available so it receives a lot of attention.
Which makes it all the more unfortunate the iPod software is non-free. Perhaps if it ran on free software someone could have added support for a lossless compression codec to it.
I'd rather not support the companies that hurt me. From other posts in this thread, there are plenty of alternatives from other organizations.