Oblomovka

2003-09-19»

You may have heard this before, but it'll be worth telling you again. If you're a member of the IEEE, please consider getting in touch with that organisation. Ask for closer scrutiny be paid to their voting machine working group - P1583 and SCC38. Standards committees, even in the best-run organisation, are prone to capture by either special interests or just their own ideas of efficiency. But a standard on voting machine cannot fall victim to that. It needs to be open - to be beyond doubt, and to allow dispassionate security analysis by third-parties. This isn't the next form of C++ templates - this is the touchstone for the corruptability of our politics.

The EFF has a page with all the details. I can't pretend to have any inside track on what's going on here. But I do know that a little fresh air and sunshine can do nothing but help. There's no rush to voting machines. There's a great deal of danger in it. And a lot of very interested parties.

2003-09-18»

He's published a short extract of his book. How do they let things like this out of Southend?

"It is a small, handwritten volume reputedly bound in the skin of the extra-terrestrial entity that plagued Benjamin Franklin's ass over six nights in Paris during his European travels. Benjamin Franklin wasn't some nancy-boy novelist who wrote sensitive books about aliens sticking things up his rectum, you know. On the seventh night he got right up and killed the little bastard with one punch."