Your master's work seems only to have been a survey of current accepted practice.
I developed years ago, 1995, voting protocols which protect the privacy of the voter. Using a three tier voting process. ID.vs. database of known voters gets you qualified voters. Now separate the voter ID and his vote results. A one way crypto function will do. Next let the qualified voter mark his authenticated ballot. Then send the results to a tally server. At the end of the vote, tally server counts all votes for authenticated ballots AND qualified voters. Since ID has been hashed to smithereens, there is no way back to mating voter to his vote. Voter can get a receipt which he uses to verify that his vote was included in the vote tally. No one knows how he voted, ever.
Since there are three processes, an intruder must corrupt not one but three crypto-secure processes simultaneously (nearly). Not likely, security is a function of separation of the domains under which the processes reside.
Since 1995 when the Internet became repurposed to revenue generation for advertising companies, innovation stopped, IMHO.
Idealism, democracy, communication and efficiency were all shoved out of the way to make room for banner adds, cross marketing gimmicks, and eye candy. All of a sudden, style dominated content driven by advertising revenue.
Thank God the advertising trash heap is about to die its unnatural death. What a waste of 5 years. I'm saddened to see the salon's of the world fail. If only they'd have realised people want salon but didn't offer any way to support their mission.
Fortune magazine, on the otherhand, earned my subscription by allowing their articles on the web. And great articles they've been. Salon has equally effective reporting but have no revenue magazine to support.
The Internet is about community building, in the salon instance. All the advertising in the world does not build community. Advertising competes for the same space required to serve community building.
Until digital transactions are supported online, revenue generation will continue to be an offline function.
Having went through the process of designing and implementing online voting systems, I can tell you choosing a cypher is not a "product" choice nor a brand choice RSA.vs. ???.
Cryptography is an engineering process. The engineer, the cryptographer. He must develop a protocol to fit the task. The choice of cypher is made at implementation.
Working with known constraints of platform, time and key lengths the implementor can assess the appropriateness of various encryption methods to fit the cryptographer's protocol.
Lastly, politics will drive the final decision based upon perceived market acceptance of the encryption methods, available encryption toolkits and governmental regulations at the time. -r
The NeXTSTEP GUI remains the finest example of best design GUI priciples. It's not perfect, there are improvements it could use but the *philosophy* is the best one.
Its OS-integrated, inter-process communication and (true) threaded application architecture present a consistent, seamless and productive environment.
Since most "grandma" candidates upcoming will have been Windows-raised, it reamins unknown which strategy will move forward from dumb-down standards.
Upcoming MacOS X will be a next generation NeXTSTEP. It is seen below and its historical development path is included FYI. It remains whether MacOS X will be better. Nor is it a certain-positive strategy to move GUI lover's forward.
-r Historical ref: Lisa GUI: http://home.san.rr.com/deans/lisagui.html MacOS X GUI: http://home.san.rr.com/deans/prototypes.html NeXT GUI: http://www.erinet.com/jag/NeXTVIEW/osbshot.jpg (tab folder version 4.0 never shipped)
This grand experiement has all the elements required for the wide-implementation of a digital cash infrastructure. It's a novel way to real world test the underlying theory of distributed cash protocol.
Since it relys upon a voting protocol, the results of this experiment could someday yield a robust infrastucture to support realtime digital transactions. Digital transactions are a voting protocol reimplemented in a different form.
Great grassroots way to test an otherwise $30million+ distributed node implementation in the real world.
This is about the *only* way the Internet will ever see digital cash transactions that will not require unsurmountable sums of cash and political will to change traditional currency systems.
The implications of Freenet inure to a wider benefit than free speech... though that may not be the stated goal.
Freenet is a good experiment for that reason alone.
1 million votes determines the California governorship. When the CA Homeowners Assoc. (~4mil) started to organize with online grassroots voting systems. California passed legislation outlawing voting over the Internet. The politicians are weary of any influence which can organize outside the channels of well paid American lobbyists.
Geeks whatever their color have an influence just a website away from the levers of Democracy.
Slashdot is well-positioned to be the arbiter of influence. All that is needed is the grassroots *need* on the readers part and legislator's willingness to get bonafide feedback from this community.
Legislation written is done with the facts provided by lobbyists. Without presenting the facts Slashdot readers intimately know them their voice is effectively silenced.
Discussion threads developed into issues (ala DMCA) then voted up or down bring consensus. Most important is to establish a feedback mechanism which boils the information down into legislator understandable format. Give legislator/aides access onto the site and their own *view* on the facts without having to comb through the verbage.
At some point in this process/. readers could eclipse the AARP/NRA in being the largest informed block of voters in the US. Instead of $$$ the power comes from grassroots initiative to *vote* legislator's out of office.vs. buy them into office.
I started a company with crypto code to protect privacy. We built election engines protecting privacy, and ecommerce engines to facilitate the exchange of information, ideas, and cash without breaking personal privacy. (ie. USTPO, banking and ePay schemes).
From the top down banking rejected privacy out-of-hand, the state of CA passed legislation making elections by Internet illegal and commerce people rightfully couldn't find prior law upon which to legally base privacy.
Bottomline here is that people take privacy for granted. There is an unspoken faith in the judicial system to right any wrong. US currency is based upon "In God we Trust" and little exists legally to support privacy (ala digital signitures).
The technology exists to build privacy into Internet transactions. But the cost for infrastructure development is high. Even hurdling the economics there remains the "key recovery" debates which trumps all progress in this area, anyhow.
/. really have to come up to speed on privacy if they want to have a hand in shaping the debate and final solution set.
Paranoia on a professional level is a *good* thing which enables us to focus on the myriad possibilities that something can go wrong. Professional paranoia is what all truly good systems people posess.
When that pathology crosses-over into personal paranoia it is a *bad* thing which erodes the foundations of trust, respect, security and hope.
The Joy Manifesto is interesting not for what it predicts about technologies as future *tools* for destruction (ala A-bomb). It points to a future in which technology _so_ blurs the lines of distinction between our professional and personal realities.
When our Reality becomes integrated with our technologies we lose objectivity and with it the ability to discriminate between the healthy and the absurd. That is the Joy Manifesto dilemna...
Linux, the culture, has usurped Linux, the kernel, in defining this phenom. It is the community, not the technology for which it stands that will determine whether Linux assends its rightful place at the table of American democracy.
Egalitarian as the tenents of Linux faithful profess, Linux the movement must coalesce its interests into *powerful* voting blocks at the pols. Strong advocacy groups must lobby for the freedoms we have taken for granted (printing, scanning, etc... right down to our own genes)
Assault upon the foundations of social, cultural and technological pinnings of the new digital economy can be fought by no other body politik than that represented by Linux.
AARP has organized the largest block of voters in the nation to protect Social Security and Medicare. Linux is a great moment in history when "the people" define the course of human events. It's a great time to be alive, as a geek.
Empowered access to all the tools to make our dreams reality, Linux is like having all the tools to fix the old cars. Enjoy it while it lasts before Linux, the community, goes the way of Popular Mechanics.
Or get active and involved to protect what rights you have left before USTPO and Corporations mediate your freedoms down to those necessary to serve their interests.
The greatest lessons I learned in CS circa 1974 were the weeks spent in the lab writing code through the night. This would go on without any indication we'd have something to hand-in that was running on Friday.
Courseware was given out on levels. If you couldn't get level1 grokked step down to an easier level2 assignment. By Friday there would be only a couple of us left grinding level1.
The lesson was that level1 while requiring more knowledge, was the easier assignment if you understood the problem. It demonstrated the power of abstraction and using the right tools for the job.
I went back to an Ivy League CS program to brush-up mid90's when I had some time. I was shocked curruculum changes had reduced a CS education to assignments out of the back of the book. All the challenge and creativity seemed sucked out of the program. Profs. admitted that they had sold out and were churning out C++ programmers for Industry.
It saddened me that these kids couldn't get the rush of knowledge acquisition and insight from the challenge of creating their own solutions. There was only the back of the book problem set and one possible solution set.
More than cram it into their skulls, challenge the curriculum with innovative problem sets that students can bring their own intelligence to the solution. If there exists only one possible solution set... there is no incentive to experiment and challenge their intellect.
An integrated n-tiered GUI environment kills your monopoly argument. The future is not about strictly defined cross-platform applications. The Internet bridges all platforms enabling designers and architects to leverage its strengths in serving across platforms. The future holds much promise for those OS vendors who integrate Internet services with the OS and focus the user environment around *cross-community* tasks.
A pedantic example would have your OS automatically convert a downloaded MS.pub file off the net on a specialized webserver into.pdf (your default format) and return to localhost.
Here the GUI is focused on your community, the OS on usability and the vendor on compatibility.
Don't forget... NCR has bubble memory which is stable and uses very little power. If alternate storage technologies scale into commodities, price points will converge with traditional hard drives.
The big online banks have their _fees_ and the little wannabe online banks can't deliver the services online. The best solution is to abstract an online source over _the best_ bank you can find. CheckFree.com allows you to choose your bank of choice - They provide the online services. CheckFree even *guarantees* your check you write from their system is _good_. What a novel idea!! When WellsFargo screwed-up their fee structure and the fees started I switched to a local bank with little online services. It was great... changed the direct deposit to the new bank. Changed CheckFree to point to the new bank and it was a GO. The advantage is that *all* your payees don't get lost in the switch. They stay with CheckFree and you are only switching your funds source. If you sucker-up to the banks BillPay system, you can't move your Payees to another bank. This one abstraction takes all the risk out of banking online. I highly recommend CheckFree for the freedom it provides. For $9.00/mo. you get to choose whatever bank you want to draw your checks against... Cool.
Re:Hi my name is Adolf, you may board the train no
on
Profiling A Nation
·
· Score: 1
Browning Arms R&D'd the electronic trigger ~1977 while I worked at their corporate headquaters. Now they have only to R&D the biochip to read your id for firing.
The easiest point of attack of your security scheme occurs server-side. I would guess patient data is streaming clear text on the server. Patient data integrity would require the communication channel to be encrypted between the.app and server.
Get this platform deployed, secure the channels in subsequent upgrades. You'll learn a lot more this way than trying to get it right the first time.
I have been intimately involved in privacy wrt: US Banking and Voting online. There is no business case to protect privacy in the corporate view. People of their own free will exchange privacy for access, discounts, rewards and membership. Most of these transactions serve only the legal requirement of acquiescence and are of little economic value. There are no successful business models which prove people will *pay* for privacy. Contrary to popular myth the Constitution does not grant a right to privacy.
Truste is what people expect, albeit insufficient and the same value as a GreenStamp.
I built an Internet polling booth for the California Homeowners Association ~4million voters. The implications were pretty straight forward. Once their opposition learned they were organizing online, their issues came to compromise quickly. California outlawed Internet voting that following session. The *idea* of organizing votes online is politically more powerful than an actual system in place.
Security aspects reduce to the age-old conundrum of proving the voter is who he says. Fraud, spoofing, server attacks and other multi-vote schemes can be dealt with. You can never insure the voter hasn't *sold* his vote, which applys to existing and online systems.
In practice online voting is far more practical and powerful in the organizing at grassroots level than nationally. Demographics, statistics and cross correlation of the two add much more insight to a campaign than the final tally. Our client liked online voting's ability to overlay Zip+4 votes against Legislative districts. Weak support in key districts allow channelling resources for outcome based campaigning.
Upside of online voting is it's ability to match $campaign$ contributions to issues (issues based donations). Funding issues directly from the constituency overcomes the vested interests of the lobbyist/corporate funder. And finally, having tabulated results *in-hand* to give a representative of _voters_ in **HIS* district who want him to cast his vote for/against an issue is quite compelling. Votes are what legislator's live on and going against their constituents is not done lightly where it can be shown that a large number of people in their district are tracking the Legislator's vote.
A cryptoanalysis is available on the voting scheme which I can repost if there is an interest. The system is demo'able on an appt'mt basis as/. effect would kill my cable modem...
What you're asking for NeXT had in spades. Since you are on a budget. The old NeXTSTEP development environment might fit your needs. Their multi-platform (NeXT, Solaris, HP-UX, Intel)code cross compiled directly. It's Obj-C had some of the easiest API's. It was CORBA compliant. Some Posix support.
When IBM wanted an OS - MS delivered When users wanted GUI - MS delivered When Busines demanded std apps - MS delivered When IT wanted client/server - MS delivered
Tactically, MS has reversed roles:
MS delivers a network - people use it MS delivers a browser - users take it MS delivers music - people listen MS delivers auctions - people bid
MICROSOFT know they are in the *Delivery* business. Linux has delivered an OS - people use it and MS notices... MS is reiforcing its franchise by Golden Handcuffing delivery customers with services.
Linux would do well to consider what & how best to foster delivery services within their own franchise - before they lose that...
/. delivers news/info - Techies love it RH delivers support - users buy it (add to list your best business case)
Maybe the weight of evidence supports the economic view. MS corporate support for public education is in line with the public's choice of MS products. Since this is a free market outcome, education should relect the free market decision. No wonder MIT economists defended MS at DOJ trial...
I can see the emerging MS Internet strategy: Haves use MS - havenots pay... They collect both ways!
MSMIT is blatant wholesale co-opting of the US educational system to the purposes of one corporate strategy. It will be the milestone in history where your career path is your.edu path.
Royalty free licensing and patent rights serve only to dress the real story - purposing of the public education system for corporate gain.
Before there was OpenSource, Linux and a movement, I dropped the Mac and went through the unix knot-hole called NeXTstep/GnuSTEP ~1991. More important than whether you become geek is that you participate in a community. NeXT had this community quality as does Linux in spades.
That community experience, as you discovered, is far more valuable and powerful than G4 processors, Mac GUIs and slick commercials. Belonging is _valuable_ to everyone involved because everyone has something to contribute.
The commodity in an OpenCommunity marketspace is contribution. While MS peddles packages, Apple boxes and Sun servers, there remains no _place_ for people in their marketspace. Linux has community where the only threshold to entry is participation and the cost of joining - contribution.
MacOS X (unix flavored Mac GUI) will be a challenge for a community that values computers over people...
Slashdot Mirror
Your master's work seems only to have been a survey of current accepted practice.
.vs. database of known voters gets you qualified voters. Now separate the voter ID and his vote results. A one way crypto function will do. Next let the qualified voter mark his authenticated ballot. Then send the results to a tally server. At the end of the vote, tally server counts all votes for authenticated ballots AND qualified voters. Since ID has been hashed to smithereens, there is no way back to mating voter to his vote. Voter can get a receipt which he uses to verify that his vote was included in the vote tally. No one knows how he voted, ever.
I developed years ago, 1995, voting protocols which protect the privacy of the voter. Using a three tier voting process. ID
Since there are three processes, an intruder must corrupt not one but three crypto-secure processes simultaneously (nearly). Not likely, security is a function of separation of the domains under which the processes reside.
-r
Is offline...
Since 1995 when the Internet became repurposed to revenue generation for advertising companies, innovation stopped, IMHO.
Idealism, democracy, communication and efficiency were all shoved out of the way to make room for banner adds, cross marketing gimmicks, and eye candy. All of a sudden, style dominated content driven by advertising revenue.
Thank God the advertising trash heap is about to die its unnatural death. What a waste of 5 years. I'm saddened to see the salon's of the world fail. If only they'd have realised people want salon but didn't offer any way to support their mission.
Fortune magazine, on the otherhand, earned my subscription by allowing their articles on the web. And great articles they've been. Salon has equally effective reporting but have no revenue magazine to support.
The Internet is about community building, in the salon instance. All the advertising in the world does not build community. Advertising competes for the same space required to serve community building.
Until digital transactions are supported online, revenue generation will continue to be an offline function.
-r
Having went through the process of designing and implementing online voting systems, I can tell you choosing a cypher is not a "product" choice nor a brand choice RSA .vs. ???.
Cryptography is an engineering process. The engineer, the cryptographer. He must develop a protocol to fit the task. The choice of cypher is made at implementation.
Working with known constraints of platform, time and key lengths the implementor can assess the appropriateness of various encryption methods to fit the cryptographer's protocol.
Lastly, politics will drive the final decision based upon perceived market acceptance of the encryption methods, available encryption toolkits and governmental regulations at the time.
-r
The NeXTSTEP GUI remains the finest example of best design GUI priciples. It's not perfect, there are improvements it could use but the *philosophy* is the best one.
Its OS-integrated, inter-process communication and (true) threaded application architecture present a consistent, seamless and productive environment.
Grandma Problems:
Heirarchial file system
Mouse-centric UI
Inspector Panels (attributes, contents, tools, permissions)
Mixed UI mepahors (clock==preferences)
Since most "grandma" candidates upcoming will have been Windows-raised, it reamins unknown which strategy will move forward from dumb-down standards.
Upcoming MacOS X will be a next generation NeXTSTEP. It is seen below and its historical development path is included FYI. It remains whether MacOS X will be better. Nor is it a certain-positive strategy to move GUI lover's forward.
-r
Historical ref:
Lisa GUI: http://home.san.rr.com/deans/lisagui.html
MacOS X GUI: http://home.san.rr.com/deans/prototypes.html
NeXT GUI: http://www.erinet.com/jag/NeXTVIEW/osbshot.jpg
(tab folder version 4.0 never shipped)
This grand experiement has all the elements required for the wide-implementation of a digital cash infrastructure. It's a novel way to real world test the underlying theory of distributed cash protocol.
Since it relys upon a voting protocol, the results of this experiment could someday yield a robust infrastucture to support realtime digital transactions. Digital transactions are a voting protocol reimplemented in a different form.
Great grassroots way to test an otherwise $30million+ distributed node implementation in the real world.
This is about the *only* way the Internet will ever see digital cash transactions that will not require unsurmountable sums of cash and political will to change traditional currency systems.
The implications of Freenet inure to a wider benefit than free speech... though that may not be the stated goal.
Freenet is a good experiment for that reason alone.
-r
unix' great contribution is the fact that it treats everything as I/O...
-r
1 million votes determines the California governorship. When the CA Homeowners Assoc. (~4mil) started to organize with online grassroots voting systems. California passed legislation outlawing voting over the Internet. The politicians are weary of any influence which can organize outside the channels of well paid American lobbyists.
Geeks whatever their color have an influence just a website away from the levers of Democracy.
-r
Slashdot is well-positioned to be the arbiter of influence. All that is needed is the grassroots *need* on the readers part and legislator's willingness to get bonafide feedback from this community.
/. readers could eclipse the AARP/NRA in being the largest informed block of voters in the US. Instead of $$$ the power comes from grassroots initiative to *vote* legislator's out of office .vs. buy them into office.
Legislation written is done with the facts provided by lobbyists. Without presenting the facts Slashdot readers intimately know them their voice is effectively silenced.
Discussion threads developed into issues (ala DMCA) then voted up or down bring consensus. Most important is to establish a feedback mechanism which boils the information down into legislator understandable format. Give legislator/aides access onto the site and their own *view* on the facts without having to comb through the verbage.
At some point in this process
I started a company with crypto code to protect privacy. We built election engines protecting privacy, and ecommerce engines to facilitate the exchange of information, ideas, and cash without breaking personal privacy. (ie. USTPO, banking and ePay schemes).
From the top down banking rejected privacy out-of-hand, the state of CA passed legislation making elections by Internet illegal and commerce people rightfully couldn't find prior law upon which to legally base privacy.
Bottomline here is that people take privacy for granted. There is an unspoken faith in the judicial system to right any wrong. US currency is based upon "In God we Trust" and little exists legally to support privacy (ala digital signitures).
The technology exists to build privacy into Internet transactions. But the cost for infrastructure development is high. Even hurdling the economics there remains the "key recovery" debates which trumps all progress in this area, anyhow.
/. really have to come up to speed on privacy if they want to have a hand in shaping the debate and final solution set.
Paranoia on a professional level is a *good* thing which enables us to focus on the myriad possibilities that something can go wrong. Professional paranoia is what all truly good systems people posess.
When that pathology crosses-over into personal paranoia it is a *bad* thing which erodes the foundations of trust, respect, security and hope.
The Joy Manifesto is interesting not for what it predicts about technologies as future *tools* for destruction (ala A-bomb). It points to a future in which technology _so_ blurs the lines of distinction between our professional and personal realities.
When our Reality becomes integrated with our technologies we lose objectivity and with it the ability to discriminate between the healthy and the absurd. That is the Joy Manifesto dilemna...
Linux, the culture, has usurped Linux, the kernel, in defining this phenom. It is the community, not the technology for which it stands that will determine whether Linux assends its rightful place at the table of American democracy.
Egalitarian as the tenents of Linux faithful profess, Linux the movement must coalesce its interests into *powerful* voting blocks at the pols. Strong advocacy groups must lobby for the freedoms we have taken for granted (printing, scanning, etc... right down to our own genes)
Assault upon the foundations of social, cultural and technological pinnings of the new digital economy can be fought by no other body politik than that represented by Linux.
AARP has organized the largest block of voters in the nation to protect Social Security and Medicare. Linux is a great moment in history when "the people" define the course of human events. It's a great time to be alive, as a geek.
Empowered access to all the tools to make our dreams reality, Linux is like having all the tools to fix the old cars. Enjoy it while it lasts before Linux, the community, goes the way of Popular Mechanics.
Or get active and involved to protect what rights you have left before USTPO and Corporations mediate your freedoms down to those necessary to serve their interests.
-Rex Riley
The greatest lessons I learned in CS circa 1974 were the weeks spent in the lab writing code through the night. This would go on without any indication we'd have something to hand-in that was running on Friday.
Courseware was given out on levels. If you couldn't get level1 grokked step down to an easier level2 assignment. By Friday there would be only a couple of us left grinding level1.
The lesson was that level1 while requiring more knowledge, was the easier assignment if you understood the problem. It demonstrated the power of abstraction and using the right tools for the job.
I went back to an Ivy League CS program to brush-up mid90's when I had some time. I was shocked curruculum changes had reduced a CS education to assignments out of the back of the book. All the challenge and creativity seemed sucked out of the program. Profs. admitted that they had sold out and were churning out C++ programmers for Industry.
It saddened me that these kids couldn't get the rush of knowledge acquisition and insight from the challenge of creating their own solutions. There was only the back of the book problem set and one possible solution set.
More than cram it into their skulls, challenge the curriculum with innovative problem sets that students can bring their own intelligence to the solution. If there exists only one possible solution set... there is no incentive to experiment and challenge their intellect.
An integrated n-tiered GUI environment kills your monopoly argument. The future is not about strictly defined cross-platform applications. The Internet bridges all platforms enabling designers and architects to leverage its strengths in serving across platforms. The future holds much promise for those OS vendors who integrate Internet services with the OS and focus the user environment around *cross-community* tasks.
.pub file off the net on a specialized webserver into .pdf (your default format) and return to localhost.
A pedantic example would have your OS automatically convert a downloaded MS
Here the GUI is focused on your community, the OS on usability and the vendor on compatibility.
Don't forget... NCR has bubble memory which is stable and uses very little power. If alternate storage technologies scale into commodities, price points will converge with traditional hard drives.
-r
The big online banks have their _fees_ and the little wannabe online banks can't deliver the services online. The best solution is to abstract an online source over _the best_ bank you can find. CheckFree.com allows you to choose your bank of choice - They provide the online services. CheckFree even *guarantees* your check you write from their system is _good_. What a novel idea!! When WellsFargo screwed-up their fee structure and the fees started I switched to a local bank with little online services. It was great... changed the direct deposit to the new bank. Changed CheckFree to point to the new bank and it was a GO. The advantage is that *all* your payees don't get lost in the switch. They stay with CheckFree and you are only switching your funds source. If you sucker-up to the banks BillPay system, you can't move your Payees to another bank. This one abstraction takes all the risk out of banking online. I highly recommend CheckFree for the freedom it provides. For $9.00/mo. you get to choose whatever bank you want to draw your checks against... Cool.
Browning Arms R&D'd the electronic trigger ~1977 while I worked at their corporate headquaters. Now they have only to R&D the biochip to read your id for firing.
-r
The easiest point of attack of your security scheme occurs server-side. I would guess patient data is streaming clear text on the server. Patient data integrity would require the communication channel to be encrypted between the .app and server.
Get this platform deployed, secure the channels in subsequent upgrades. You'll learn a lot more this way than trying to get it right the first time.
I have been intimately involved in privacy wrt: US Banking and Voting online. There is no business case to protect privacy in the corporate view. People of their own free will exchange privacy for access, discounts, rewards and membership. Most of these transactions serve only the legal requirement of acquiescence and are of little economic value. There are no successful business models which prove people will *pay* for privacy. Contrary to popular myth the Constitution does not grant a right to privacy.
Truste is what people expect, albeit insufficient and the same value as a GreenStamp.
I built an Internet polling booth for the California Homeowners Association ~4million voters. The implications were pretty straight forward. Once their opposition learned they were organizing online, their issues came to compromise quickly. California outlawed Internet voting that following session. The *idea* of organizing votes online is politically more powerful than an actual system in place.
/. effect would kill my cable modem...
Security aspects reduce to the age-old conundrum of proving the voter is who he says. Fraud, spoofing, server attacks and other multi-vote schemes can be dealt with. You can never insure the voter hasn't *sold* his vote, which applys to existing and online systems.
In practice online voting is far more practical and powerful in the organizing at grassroots level than nationally. Demographics, statistics and cross correlation of the two add much more insight to a campaign than the final tally. Our client liked online voting's ability to overlay Zip+4 votes against Legislative districts. Weak support in key districts allow channelling resources for outcome based campaigning.
Upside of online voting is it's ability to match $campaign$ contributions to issues (issues based donations). Funding issues directly from the constituency overcomes the vested interests of the lobbyist/corporate funder. And finally, having tabulated results *in-hand* to give a representative of _voters_ in **HIS* district who want him to cast his vote for/against an issue is quite compelling. Votes are what legislator's live on and going against their constituents is not done lightly where it can be shown that a large number of people in their district are tracking the Legislator's vote.
A cryptoanalysis is available on the voting scheme which I can repost if there is an interest. The system is demo'able on an appt'mt basis as
What you're asking for NeXT had in spades. Since you are on a budget. The old NeXTSTEP development environment might fit your needs. Their multi-platform (NeXT, Solaris, HP-UX, Intel)code cross compiled directly. It's Obj-C had some of the easiest API's. It was CORBA compliant. Some Posix support.
Top Tier:
Mc Gill
Carneige Mellon Univ.
MIT
None will teach ColdFusion, Perl, ASP, Javascript, etc...
When IBM wanted an OS - MS delivered
When users wanted GUI - MS delivered
When Busines demanded std apps - MS delivered
When IT wanted client/server - MS delivered
Tactically, MS has reversed roles:
MS delivers a network - people use it
MS delivers a browser - users take it
MS delivers music - people listen
MS delivers auctions - people bid
MICROSOFT know they are in the *Delivery* business. Linux has delivered an OS - people use it and MS notices... MS is reiforcing its franchise by Golden Handcuffing delivery customers with services.
Linux would do well to consider what & how best to foster delivery services within their own franchise - before they lose that...
/. delivers news/info - Techies love it
RH delivers support - users buy it
(add to list your best business case)
Maybe the weight of evidence supports the economic view. MS corporate support for public education is in line with the public's choice of MS products. Since this is a free market outcome, education should relect the free market decision. No wonder MIT economists defended MS at DOJ trial...
I can see the emerging MS Internet strategy: Haves use MS - havenots pay... They collect both ways!
MSMIT is blatant wholesale co-opting of the US educational system to the purposes of one corporate strategy. It will be the milestone in history where your career path is your .edu path.
Royalty free licensing and patent rights serve only to dress the real story - purposing of the public education system for corporate gain.
Before there was OpenSource, Linux and a movement, I dropped the Mac and went through the unix knot-hole called NeXTstep/GnuSTEP ~1991. More important than whether you become geek is that you participate in a community. NeXT had this community quality as does Linux in spades.
That community experience, as you discovered, is far more valuable and powerful than G4 processors, Mac GUIs and slick commercials. Belonging is _valuable_ to everyone involved because everyone has something to contribute.
The commodity in an OpenCommunity marketspace is contribution. While MS peddles packages, Apple boxes and Sun servers, there remains no _place_ for people in their marketspace. Linux has community where the only threshold to entry is participation and the cost of joining - contribution.
MacOS X (unix flavored Mac GUI) will be a challenge for a community that values computers over people...