Is voting in Canada with a pencil and paper secure ?

October 14, 2008 – 8:51 pm

So as far back as 2003, Robert Cringely of InfoWorld was commenting on the huge brouhaha surrounding the technical SNAFU (yes, it’s an acronym) that exploded along with e-voting systems which Diebold launched over in the U.S.

As I was voting in our Canadian Federal Election earlier this evening, I crouched down behind the cardboard privacy barrier and unfolded my paper ballot and saw the lead pencil placed on the table. I thought to myself … “hey, anyone could use an eraser and change my vote!” … so after getting home and peeling some shrimp for my election night shrimp curry and basmati dinner, I decided to do some Googling (as Asking, and Liveing and Yahoo!ing) for thoughts on a pencil as a voting instrument (vs. gel pen, for example)…

One of the 1st and most common results was a 2003 article by Robert Cringely done for PBS at the time, and I loved his adoration of the Canadian voting system (and how our voting cost per elector is just $1.80 or so vs $10 per voter in the US…)

My model for smart voting is Canada. The Canadians are watching our election problems and laughing their butts off. They think we are crazy, and they are right.

Forget touch screens and electronic voting. In Canadian Federal elections, two barely-paid representatives of each party, known as “scrutineers,” are present all day at the voting place. If there are more political parties, there are more scrutineers. To vote, you write an “X” with a pencil in a one centimeter circle beside the candidate’s name, fold the ballot up and stuff it into a box. Later, the scrutineers AND ANY VOTER WHO WANTS TO WATCH all sit at a table for about half an hour and count every ballot, keeping a tally for each candidate. If the counts agree at the end of the process, the results are phoned-in and everyone goes home. If they don’t, you do it again. Fairness is achieved by balanced self-interest, not by technology. The population of Canada is about the same as California, so the elections are of comparable scale. In the last Canadian Federal election the entire vote was counted in four hours. Why does it take us 30 days or more?

Also note how he mentions that any voter can sit in and take part in the ballot counting process.

We truly do live in the greatest country in the world, and anyone who doesn’t exercise their right to vote is truly ignorant of our bliss – at least as far as free and fair voting goes.

Full article by Robert X. Cringely

By Robin | Posted in General | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

The Children of Gordon Gekko … brilliant speech by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd

October 11, 2008 – 9:10 pm

There are but a handful of my friends who will actually recognize the name Gordon Gekko… yes, Michael Douglas, Martin Sheen, Charlie Sheen and many others in the seminary Wall Street epic by Oliver Stone of the same name.

A few days ago, Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia gave a most insightful speech on the current global financial meltdown and banking system failure.

It’s required reading for anyone who thinks that unrestrained extreme capitalism is truly the way to go….

A couple of excerpts from his talk:

Gordon Gekko wasn’t tamed in 1987; he was simply ignored. Much of the root cause of the sub-prime crisis came down to our financial markets rewarding people for taking extravagant risks. Executives earned huge bonuses. Their rewards were skewed to short-term success rather than long-term creation of asset value.

Indeed. During the tech bubble of the late nineties, how many of my friends compared themselves (and me) to Gordon… all hoping to swing trade another double on a lofty new IPO of a tech startup selling watermelons on the new World-Wide-Web. Oops… at the time it was eWaterMelons or iFireWoodOnline or what have you.

These were the most obvious manifestations of the culture of greed and short-termism that pervaded large parts of the US financial sector. This culture was never challenged by a political and economic ideology of extreme capitalism. And this crisis bears the fingerprints of the extreme free-market ideologues who influence much of the neo-liberal economic elite, free-market ideologues who have a naive belief that unrestrained markets are always self-correcting and that markets left to themselves will always achieve optimum outcomes. Ideologues who believe that any regulation of private business is fundamentally wrong. Ideologues who have resisted the regulation of financial markets and the supervision of a wide range of financial institutions. Ideologues who lectured the developing countries caught up in the Asian financial crisis a decade ago about the need for transparency and disclosure, but did little to reform their own financial systems. Ideologues who believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. Except, of course, when there is a crash; then, the self-same ideologues argue, having privatised their profits, that we should socialise their losses. And, by the way, after they have demanded lower and lower taxes all the way through.

’nuff said. He gets it. Read more in an excerpt of The Children of Gordon Gekko by Kevin Rudd.

By Robin | Posted in Investing | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

phpFox 1.6.21 officially released - maintenance release fixes bugs

October 9, 2008 – 11:21 pm

Just a heads up to any phpFox administrators; phpFox 1.6.21 has been officially released for download.

It fixes several bug issues, most notably issues around Event Comments, blocking users, the Lytebox, time and date issues and a few others.

As always, worth maintaining your phpFox version up to date.

By Robin | Posted in Software, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

How big is a 1500 kVA UPS - check out this 300 kVA Powerware UPS on eBay …

October 9, 2008 – 9:15 pm

Had an interesting meeting where we discussed UPS (uninterruptible power supply) systems and we were discussing a possible acquisition of a series of “1500 kVA” units.

(This is for an IT server room, although anything over 25kVA would, in my books, qualify as a data centre)…

So I did a bit of research and found this 300 kVA UPS on sale on eBay:

OK, so if that is a 300 kVA unit and it has a price around $33K (and looks about the size of three 42U rack cabinets) .. how monstrous would a 1500 kVA unit be ?

By Robin | Posted in Hardware | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Spammers new tactic for WordPress comment spam : start with a “legitimate” comment… hope for Wordpress auto-approval for subsequent comments

October 8, 2008 – 6:31 pm

So I noticed this comment which made it by my spam protection (which include Akismet, amongst other tools and methods)

*******************
*********222@gmail.com | 92.113.xxx.xxx

Recently, my husband started with the potential problem and our relations are deadlocked.
After all, I love sex … I encouraged him to go to the doctor, and he is afraid.
Maybe someone who will help us, tell of impotence pills and where to buy them anonymously. In advance thank you to all who help!
Sorry if in the wrong section leave a message!

Now a couple of things;

  • The comment contains no extreme terms that would have it flagged by spam detection systems, other than sex and impotence pills, which are not exactly like the v**gr* or c**l*s ones… not….
  • There are zero hyperlinks in the comment, nor in the Author URL field….
  • The user left a reasonably realistic “real-person” type name and realistic looking gmail address with the comment (comment author emails are never revealed except if the commenter puts it in their comment)….

    • So what’s wrong ?

    Well…. first of all, the comment was left on one of my articles discussion phpFox… not exactly relevant to be “requesting” information about ED pills.

    In addition, this is my tech site, so it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be discussing sexual dysfunction solution providers (unless they have a unique technical or business model pis encore la!) …. so.

    Spamkilled.

    Why did the spammer (or spambot) try this ? Because they try to hope that the blog owner will approve this initial comment since it contains no hyperlinks, no crass spammy message…. and also hope that the blog owner has set his WordPress blog to auto-approve comments from authors with a previously approved comment….

    Nice try folks.

    By Robin | Posted in IT Security | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)