Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Tri-Valley Herald Online - Diebold apologizes for device flaws

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

It is an uncommon day when the nation’s second-largest provider of voting systems concedes that its flagship products in California have significant security flaws and that it supplied hundreds of poorly designed electronic-voting devices that disenfranchised voters in the March presidential primary.

Diebold Election Services Inc. president Bob Urosevich admitted this and more, and apologized “for any embarrassment.”

“We were caught. We apologize for that,” Urosevich said of the mass failures of devices needed to call up digital ballots. Poll-workers in Alameda and San Diego counties hadn’t been trained on ways around their failure, and San Diego County chose not to supply polls with backup paper ballots, crippling the largest rollout of e-voting in the nation on March 2. Unknown thousands of voters were turned away at the polls.

“We’re sorry for the inconvenience of the voters,” Urosevich said.

“Weren’t they actually disenfranchised?” asked Tony Miller, chief counsel to the state’s elections division.

After a moment, Urosevich agreed: “Yes, sir.”

So now what? Where does Diebold go from here? Fines? Or do they just market their buggy software to democracies outside the US like other US companies do with their faulty products that can’t be sold here (Nestle’s baby formula comes to mind). Sorry just doesn’t cut it IMHO.

Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor’s eJournal - Earth 911, Model of E-Governance, Not Part of Government

Gillmor describes the innovative environmental web site Earth 911 where “government workers and volunteers are feeding all kinds of environment-related information into Earth 911, an environmental clearinghouse of unparalleled scope and value, serving both governments and communities.”

Gillmor notes that Earth 911 combines databases and the “staff members massage the data, then arrange it so the public can use it. The result is a highly centralized core, yet relying on a thoroughly decentralized data-collection system, that feels utterly local to the person looking for information.”

When you visit the Earth 911 site and put in your ZIP code, you don’t see a list of agencies. You see a list of topics — and only when you drill deep into the site do you ever learn which, if any, government agency is providing the service.

This is more than an interesting and useful site. It iis a model for collaborative research and ease of use of complex information.

Amazon’s Much Discussed a9 Goes Live Gary Price, ResourceShelf,
Wednesday, April 14, 2004.
Best overview and links so far on Amazon’s new
search engine, a9.

Openfield - Wikified Books

[Politech] Karl Auerbach on ICANN, Commerce Department, and broken promises

Today ICANN/US-DoC has made it plain that under their form of Internet
governance, the users of the net are excluded from any role except that of
paying the bills…. You and I as internet users will have about as much say in who becomes the
next pope as we do in the formulation of policies by the ICANN/Dept of
Commerce generation of internet governance bodies.

google.public.support.general FAQ.
“This article includes answers to questions that appear especially
frequently in the newsgroup google.public.support.general. It is not
intended to replace Google’s official FAQs and information for
webmasters.” (Thanks to Research Buzz!)

Governments and governance | Perspectives | CNET News.com.

Danny Weitzner is technology and society domain leader at the World Wide Web Consortium and principal research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. In this opinion piece he addresses the issues of who governs the Internet and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s recent call for the Internet and the World Wide Web support “the cause of human development.”
In a balanced view of the issues, Weitzner says, “…we must work to be sure that technical standards-setting venues are truly responsive to social as well as technical needs from around the world.”

Slashdot | Attorney Mike Godwin Answers ‘Cyberlaw’ Questions

An excellent Slashdot interview with Attorney Mike Godwin, author of Cyber Rights, Defending Free Speach in the Digital Age. “Now the senior technology counsel for Public Knowledge, Mike Godwin served for nine years as the first Staff Counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation” (more…).

Harvard-hosted weblogs” href=”http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/directory/36/harvardWeblogs/harvardhostedWeblogs”>Harvard Weblogs: Harvard weblogs > Harvard-hosted weblogs. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School supports weblogs for
anyone who has a harvard.edu email address. There are almost 500 listed at the moment and, from the names, i’m guessing that many of them are tests without much content. But this is the home of some interesting blogs.
For example:

• Christopher Lydon Interviews… where you can find
  MP3 recordings of interviews with Lawrence Lessig, Paul Krugman, Gore Vidal, Harold Bloom, and many more.
• Harvard Weblogs
• j’s scratchpad
• A Copyfighter’s Musings
• BloggerCon

To explore a different way, try
sites ranked by page-reads

UThink: Blogs at the University Libraries — Announcement Archives

UThink is available to the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. All you need to login and start blogging is your U of M Internet ID and Password. You can create as many blogs as you want, and attach as many authors to those blogs as you want. A faculty member could have a blog for every class he or she teaches, and attach the students in those classes to his or her blogs as authors to encourage discussion and debate. A student could also have a blog for every class, or just use blogs to express opinions and viewpoints about world events. A student could also create a club blog, or a blog for his or her friends, and also attach as many authors to those blogs as he or she deems necessary. Faculty could also use the blogging system to track a research initiative, or even publish the drafts of papers they are working on.