Almost the same in Estonia, and increasingly so in other Baltic countries and many other places in Europe. The middle man may be different but this is pretty similar to what Fortumo is doing (fortumo.com). The wiki article sums it up.
..but TFA sports a case of roughly-drafted-itis in my opinion. While making a good point that Apple could do better and be more flexible in its approach than any of the old mobile dinosaurs, it could have been said in a much more compact way - without nice stock charts and raves about 'Apple doing better than any other tech company'
I agree - my company is currently planning to move it's IT department to a new office building, and therefore there has been lots of floor plan sketching going on. Most of the developers _asked_ for an open space, entry level desktops at walls to check e-mails and high-end workstations in the middle of the room for pair programming. However, it's definitely a matter of job description - it's clear that system administrators wouldn't benefit much from that kind of setup.
As an Estonian e-voter I have some things to add;) There is a general document on the process that also covers the storage of votes and identity management.
Basically, the (anonymous) vote is encrypted and stored in an envelope bearing the voter's ID. So you can later change your vote and your vote can be discarded if you decide to do it the old way. However, the keys used to encrypt the votes are generated by a hardware crypto-server. To access the private keys needed to decrypt the votes, 4 of 6 smartcard-equipped representatives must be present.
I'm not a cryptographics guru but I believe in the 'mathematical' soundness of all this. However, main concerns of serious opponents rely elsewhere. The voting process is not as transparent as it is in the case of ordinary paper-and-pen mechanism. You can basically buy the ID card from some poor homeless dude (or even help him acquire it and pay for it + some extra for booze) and nobody can later invalidate the vote(s) you gave. There are some other related ways of possible abuse, such as using botnets/malware to render e-voting infrastructure useless etc, but they have been generally taken care of as e-voting can only be used during so-called pre-voting period (not sure what might be the correct terminology), before the actual election day. So if you couldn't e-vote, you can always go and resort to the good old way.
Heh-heh. That should be a topic almost everybody has their say on;)
Anyways - being a kid from the Eastern Europe (born in '79 so the iron curtain was not to be pulled up for another 8-9-10 years) I had quite a peculiar way of getting comfy with computers. I probably got quite lucky - my parents were computer specialists at our Tallinn Technical University (called Tallinn Institute of Polytechnics back then) which enabled them to, lo and behold, sometimes even drag some hardware home. The very first computer we had at home was Macintosh SE. The second computer I remember having on the desk in their bedroom was a Robotron - I don't even remember (guess I even never knew it) what was it a clone of. Nothing peculiar there, it ran some kind of DOS and I had my share of games there - Xonix, Sopwith, a Tetris clone thrown together by some guy from the same University. However, they used it for some project my mother was doing for some educational organization in FoxBase and I tried some data access and on-screen forms, probably wrote my first batch files too. If I remember at least somewhat correctly, I was about 8 or 9 at that time.
About the same time (right after they returned that Robotron) my mom and two of her colleagues somehow got hired to develop a simple scheduler/CRM for Finnish dentists. As the end users were supposed to use Macs, we had an absolutely 100% bona fide Macintosh SE for a year or two. This was probably the time I got my first shot at programming - MacOS Classic (version 6 at the time) had an application called HyperCard, created for storing card-based information or something like that. Quite peculiar now that I think back on it but it also featured a programming (or more like scripting) language called HyperTalk that was friendly enough to use constructs quite similar to English. I wrote some small programs that were quite fun - I could draw on the screen and use some sprite-like animations that I possibly would have had a harder time with in QBasic et al in DOS.
And then dawned one of the best days of my life - the dude responsible for the Finnish side of that aforementioned project found that he has a completely spare "computer" laying in his den. A Casio FP-200 (you can find some information here. I absolutely loved it. It was programmable, it had a freakin' graphical PLOTTER and it was mine. MINE. Mine to hack and mine to break. Not that it was great fun to hack it - no way to do anything with it but type BASIC code into its 8K memory. It also had a user manual with some sample programs and games. I remember typing about 500 lines of code into the machine, line by line, not knowing one bit about BASIC but being eager to learn. And learn I did - a few months later I coded a small game into it with help from my father, it was turn-based, had monsters, keys and locks and treasures and was lame than hell, but it was mine;) The plotter ran out of ink soon with no hope of replacement.. the single sided single density external floppy drive about the size of the "computer" itself broke down.. but I learned to use sin and cos to draw a circle, to write recursive code and lots of small things that now definitely have evolved into something in my head that lets me make my living as a Java programmer and software designer.
that most definitely depends on the price of powering those large gas-powered vehicles, which at $120/barrel (one of the predictions for times the oil production starts to decline) would be steep enough for most..
Slashdot Mirror
Almost the same in Estonia, and increasingly so in other Baltic countries and many other places in Europe. The middle man may be different but this is pretty similar to what Fortumo is doing (fortumo.com). The wiki article sums it up.
well, it would be qwertz for the Germans.. :)
..but TFA sports a case of roughly-drafted-itis in my opinion. While making a good point that Apple could do better and be more flexible in its approach than any of the old mobile dinosaurs, it could have been said in a much more compact way - without nice stock charts and raves about 'Apple doing better than any other tech company'
Mind you, this is Europe. Possibly your comment was meant as a joke...
;)
I'm not really into all these prejudices about US legal system and 'constant suing of each other's asses off' but hey, people _are_ kidding about it
I agree - my company is currently planning to move it's IT department to a new office building, and therefore there has been lots of floor plan sketching going on. Most of the developers _asked_ for an open space, entry level desktops at walls to check e-mails and high-end workstations in the middle of the room for pair programming. However, it's definitely a matter of job description - it's clear that system administrators wouldn't benefit much from that kind of setup.
As an Estonian e-voter I have some things to add ;) There is a general document on the process that also covers the storage of votes and identity management.
Basically, the (anonymous) vote is encrypted and stored in an envelope bearing the voter's ID. So you can later change your vote and your vote can be discarded if you decide to do it the old way. However, the keys used to encrypt the votes are generated by a hardware crypto-server. To access the private keys needed to decrypt the votes, 4 of 6 smartcard-equipped representatives must be present.
I'm not a cryptographics guru but I believe in the 'mathematical' soundness of all this. However, main concerns of serious opponents rely elsewhere. The voting process is not as transparent as it is in the case of ordinary paper-and-pen mechanism. You can basically buy the ID card from some poor homeless dude (or even help him acquire it and pay for it + some extra for booze) and nobody can later invalidate the vote(s) you gave. There are some other related ways of possible abuse, such as using botnets/malware to render e-voting infrastructure useless etc, but they have been generally taken care of as e-voting can only be used during so-called pre-voting period (not sure what might be the correct terminology), before the actual election day. So if you couldn't e-vote, you can always go and resort to the good old way.
Heh-heh. That should be a topic almost everybody has their say on ;)
;) The plotter ran out of ink soon with no hope of replacement.. the single sided single density external floppy drive about the size of the "computer" itself broke down.. but I learned to use sin and cos to draw a circle, to write recursive code and lots of small things that now definitely have evolved into something in my head that lets me make my living as a Java programmer and software designer.
Anyways - being a kid from the Eastern Europe (born in '79 so the iron curtain was not to be pulled up for another 8-9-10 years) I had quite a peculiar way of getting comfy with computers. I probably got quite lucky - my parents were computer specialists at our Tallinn Technical University (called Tallinn Institute of Polytechnics back then) which enabled them to, lo and behold, sometimes even drag some hardware home. The very first computer we had at home was Macintosh SE. The second computer I remember having on the desk in their bedroom was a Robotron - I don't even remember (guess I even never knew it) what was it a clone of. Nothing peculiar there, it ran some kind of DOS and I had my share of games there - Xonix, Sopwith, a Tetris clone thrown together by some guy from the same University. However, they used it for some project my mother was doing for some educational organization in FoxBase and I tried some data access and on-screen forms, probably wrote my first batch files too. If I remember at least somewhat correctly, I was about 8 or 9 at that time.
About the same time (right after they returned that Robotron) my mom and two of her colleagues somehow got hired to develop a simple scheduler/CRM for Finnish dentists. As the end users were supposed to use Macs, we had an absolutely 100% bona fide Macintosh SE for a year or two. This was probably the time I got my first shot at programming - MacOS Classic (version 6 at the time) had an application called HyperCard, created for storing card-based information or something like that. Quite peculiar now that I think back on it but it also featured a programming (or more like scripting) language called HyperTalk that was friendly enough to use constructs quite similar to English. I wrote some small programs that were quite fun - I could draw on the screen and use some sprite-like animations that I possibly would have had a harder time with in QBasic et al in DOS.
And then dawned one of the best days of my life - the dude responsible for the Finnish side of that aforementioned project found that he has a completely spare "computer" laying in his den. A Casio FP-200 (you can find some information here. I absolutely loved it. It was programmable, it had a freakin' graphical PLOTTER and it was mine. MINE. Mine to hack and mine to break. Not that it was great fun to hack it - no way to do anything with it but type BASIC code into its 8K memory. It also had a user manual with some sample programs and games. I remember typing about 500 lines of code into the machine, line by line, not knowing one bit about BASIC but being eager to learn. And learn I did - a few months later I coded a small game into it with help from my father, it was turn-based, had monsters, keys and locks and treasures and was lame than hell, but it was mine
that most definitely depends on the price of powering those large gas-powered vehicles, which at $120/barrel (one of the predictions for times the oil production starts to decline) would be steep enough for most..
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!