- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

RE: The Values-Vote Myth
by John Kelsey 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

>From: "J.A. Terranson" <measl(a)mfn.org> >Sent: Nov 6, 2004 5:07 PM >To: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina(a)hotmail.com> >Cc: rah(a)shipwright.com, cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Subject: RE: The Values-Vote Myth >On Sat, 6 Nov 2004, Tyler Durden wrote: ... >> So: A 'moral values' question for Cypherpunks. Does this election indict the >> American people as being complicit in the crime known as "Operation >> Freedom"? (I notice everyone forgot about that name.) >Complicit? Thats *technically* correct, but not nearly strong enough. Similarly, if I hold some stock in Exxon, am I complicit in every crime done by the management of Exxon? How does this change if I'm a child whose trust fund contains the stock? Or if I hold a mutual fund I inherited with a little Exxon stock, which can be sold off only if I'm willing to move thousands of miles from my home, learn a new language, uproot my family, etc.? Is there any outcome of the election that would have made it immoral to attack Americans? (Certainly not electing Kerry, who planned to continue holding down Iraq for the forseeable future, though he correctly stated that invading it was a mistake in the first place.) And if we accept this kind of collective guilt logic, why is, say, flattening Fallujah to make an example for the rest of Iraq, wrong? > -TD >J.A. Terranson --John

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Re: Your source code, for sale
by Tyler Durden 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

Oh, I assumed that this verification 'layer' was disjoint from the e$ layer. In other words, you might have a 3rd party e$ issuer, but after that they shouldn't be necessary....or, there's a different 3rd party for the verification process. I think that's reasonable, but of course one could argue "what's the point if you already need a 3rd party for the e$". But I think that's a disjoint set of issues. -TD >From: Ben Laurie <ben(a)algroup.co.uk> >To: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina(a)hotmail.com> >CC: chris.kuethe(a)gmail.com, cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Subject: Re: Your source code, for sale >Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 11:50:28 +0000 > >Tyler Durden wrote: >> >>>What if I block the outbound "release the money" message after I >>>unbundle the images. Sure, I've already committed my money, but you >>>can't get to it. In effect I've just ripped you off, because I have >>>usable product and you don't have usable money. >> >> >>Well, yes, but this would be a very significant step forward from the >>current situation. As t-->infinity the vast majority of non-payments are >>going to be for the purpose of greed. If the payment is already 'gone', >>then you need a whole different set of motives for wanting to screw >>somebody even if you get nothing out of it. So in other words, you have at >>least solved the payment problem "to the first order", with no 3rd party. >>With fancier mechanisms I would think you can solve it to 2nd order too. > >How do you make the payment already "gone" without using a third party? _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/

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[ISN] Velva Klaessy, government code breaker, dies at 88
by R.A. Hettinga 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

--- begin forwarded text

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[ISN] E-gold Tracks Cisco Code Thief
by R.A. Hettinga 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

--- begin forwarded text

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How organized religion, not net religion, won it for Bush
by R.A. Hettinga 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/05/jesus_blog_dems/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT How organized religion, not net religion, won it for Bush By Ashlee Vance in Chicago (ashlee.vance at theregister.co.uk) Published Friday 5th November 2004 17:21 GMT Election 2004 Technophobes and luddites won the election for George W Bush in 2004, not technology-toting bloggers, by turning out the vote. The giant, self-congratulatory humpfest that is the blogger nation really didn't do much at all for the Democrats, despite Joe Trippi telling anyone who'll listen that the internet transformed politics. For voter turn-out was markedly higher in the states with the lowest broadband penetration. Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York and California have the highest broadband penetration and all went to Kerry. Meanwhile, Mississippi, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico have the lowest penetration and all went to Bush. But the rise in votes was proportionately higher in states where the internet doesn't reach so many people. In blogless Mississippi, Bush received 666,000 votes in 2004 compared to 549,000 in 2000. That's more than a 20 per cent increase in votes. (Somehow we doubt that P. Diddy threatening youngsters in Mississippi to "Vote or Die" did much to inspire youth turnout.) Kerry picked up 440,000 in Mississippi compared to Gore's 400,000 votes - about a 10 per cent difference. What about a battleground, internet-wary state like New Mexico? The Land of Enchantment chucked 370,000 votes Bush's way in 2004 compared to 286,000 in 2000, when Bush lost the state. Kerry picked up 362,000 compared to Gore's 286,000. These numbers prove little other than that voting totals increased handily and always in Bush's favor in states largely considered lacking in IT but strong in Jesus. In broadband rich Connecticut, Kerry picked up 848,000 votes compared to Gore's 796,000. That's close to a 6 per cent rise. Bush earned 687,000 votes in 2004 compared to 546,000 in 2000. That's a handy 26 per cent gain. In New Jersey, the story is similar. Kerry pulled in 1.8m votes compared to Gore's 1.75m. Bush, however, nabbed 1.6m votes in 2004 versus 1.3m in 2000. With all those statistics out of the way, we're left with one conclusion. A year ago we were told (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/14/one_blogger_is_worth_ten/) that One Blogger is Worth Ten Votes. In reality, however, it may be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for bloggers to deliver you the election. This is the most obvious and frivolous takeaway from this year's election/revival. For months, the internet was buzzed by so-called citizen journalists - otherwise known as message board tools - who convinced each other that they were making a difference. They often analyzed their own convincing and then concluded that they were indeed right. Then W. won and did so by a larger margin than in 2000. But has anyone told Joe Trippi? A long strange Trippi "What has been amazing this year is the creativity of Generation E's members to spur and engage more of its generation to become involved and make a difference," Trippi claims in his blog. And later on, (http://www.joetrippi.com/node/view/753) he writes - "Young Americans are awake like never before and studies show the earlier a voter becomes an active voter the more likely they are to be active voters throughout their life. Politicians beware. A generational giant has been awakened." There are so many things wrong with this, and with Trippi himself, that it's hard to know where to begin. Let's at least start by looking at what the droopy god of blog scum was trying to explain. Trippi questions the numerous analysts who don't believe the youth vote was all that spectacular this election. There were more young voters, but there were more voters period as a result of population increases and shared hatred. Trippi tells us that the pundits are missing the point. Close to 10 per cent more young voters showed up this time around, the youngsters "were especially active in battleground states," and many voted with absentee ballots, meaning they were missed by exit polls. If, however, more young people did show up, they weren't terribly impressive. All week long, Joe Trippi dangled his jowls on MSNBC, on the basis of an unsuccessful campaign, and we seem to remember (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/28/dean_campaign_waves_net_guru/) for getting himself sacked after boosting his favorite DRM company while getting the dumb Doc to advocate TCPA: the lock-down computing Microsoft wants to build into Windows to stop you sharing music. Again and again, he promised that the internet and bloggers would bring out the youth vote. NPR gladly repeated this almost every day. And then, like Zogby, he stuck to his promises despite so much evidence to the contrary. Again and again, he told America that Kerry had pulled in eight times as much money as Bush online. The perky MSNBC drones next to him guffawed at the rich evidence of web success. The blogger army fell right into line behind Trippi. It told itself how awful W was. It told itself how much "it" matters - how it showed those swift boat veterans a thing or two. How the internet is freedom and how rapid communication is "pretty awesome," as our president might say. "I've written a lot in my "Trippi's Take" columns about how the Internet empowers the bottom, and how that empowerment energizes citizen involvement that can create real change in an otherwise top-down world," Trippi again writes. Trippi isn't the only one to blame. All the blogging believers are at fault. Even if Jesus set up a blogging cafe in the center of Rockport, Texas and extolled the virtues of a woman's right to choose while snapping pictures of gay weddings with his Nokia, it would have made no difference to this election. All of the bloggers would have told themselves about the miracle, while Bobby and Bobby Sue went right along with their business. The longer the Democrats pretend that their vacuum of righteousness is actually reaching the public at large, helped by NPR, the more trouble they will be in. Be it an internet wasteland like New Mexico or fat pipe rich Connecticut, it doesn't matter. George W. Bush kicked your blogging ass. Now internet zombies need to take lessons from those Dems that actually got out and participated in the world. Most of the evangelicals in Alabama certainly weren't reading georgeisthebest.typepad.com to summon up their inspiration to vote. No, they had a fearless leader screaming at them about fear and impending doom. If the Democrats want to make some gains over the next four years, they'd be well suited to get a message with some substance and weight instead hoping that empty technology will somehow save them. . -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Nerd party needed to replace 'left-wing' Democrats, says area man
by R.A. Hettinga 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/05/net_nerd_party/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT Nerd party needed to replace 'left-wing' Democrats, says area man By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco (andrew.orlowski at theregister.co.uk) Published Friday 5th November 2004 17:20 GMT Election 2004 A newspaper columnist has called for the old-fashioned, "left wing" Democratic Party to be replaced by a new, emergent party of computer nerds. Free-marketeer Dan Gillmor of Silicon Valley's San Jose Mercury urges the Democrats to abandon "old, discredited politics", while an "increasingly radical middle" needs a new party with some "creative thinking". From where will this come? In a column (http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10086652.htm) published the same day, he tells us. Writing before the outcome was known, Gillmor enthuses about "the most exciting development ... the new world of cyber-politics," where the "expanded horizons" on offer should cancel out the groupthink, which he briefly acknowledges, and lead to greater accountability and participation. Such settler rhetoric - "new world", "horizons" - is familiar stuff from techno utopians. So too is the hope, amongst many intelligent, impatient people with a reluctance to develop their social skills, that we must be able to do better. (Bill Gates doesn't have the patience or inclination to watch TV, and many internet activists don't have the patience or inclination to persuade a stranger, which is a lot more difficult and unrewarding.) We briefly heard about "Emergent Democracy" last Spring, although it disappeared in about the time it takes you to say "Second Superpower". But we're sure to hear more about this itchy, push-button, "interactive" version of democracy, a kind of thumbs down at the Roman Coliseum, in the future. Maybe Dan will become its Arthur Schlesinger. But for now, how can a computer-savvy nerd party help? We don't see Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, having trouble being re-elected, and the man's been described as a "one-man socialist Torquemada." Because politics is n-dimensional, based on values and not some right-left scale, his "old fashioned" efforts to remind corporations of their social responsibilities may well be very popular if put to the public. [*]So it isn't clear that the Democrats must abandon the idea that we're happier when the corporations are left to manage themselves. Nor is it clear that the internet is a net civic good, yet, or that it increased voter turnout more than other factors did in the 2004 election. So the conclusion that we're then invited to draw - that the Democrats are doomed because they're lagging in some kind of technological arms race - doesn't necessarily follow. But let's take each one of these ideas in turn. Man machine Such settler rhetoric flourishes where a sensible grasp of what humans can do, and what the machines can do, is out of kilter. Wild and improbable visions often follow. When something good happens, people are quick to praise the machines. "If people are more moved than ever to participate, I'm betting that the Net played a big role," writes Dan. But if something bad happens, we blame stupid humans for not "getting it". Voters in Texas using machines from Hart InterCivic, discovered that their votes were nullified when they browsed the ballot by turning a wheel. "It's not a machine issue," Shafer said. "It's voters not properly following the instructions." And you might ask, who's fault is it that the Jim Crow boxes were so badly designed? (Dan, to his great credit, urged Californian voters to demand an auditable paper ballot this week, and castigated election officials for not making voters aware that they had the option.) But the echo chamber effect won't go away, because it's a defining characteristic of computer-mediated communications everywhere, and not just in this deeply polarized country. My colleague Thomas Greene puts it most succinctly. "You can say something someone disagrees with at a party, and they'll talk to you. Try doing this online." Where the barriers to participation are low, the barriers to making a hurried exit are equally low. There are no social obligations to sticking around, unlike in the real world. (There are subtle factors within the overall trend. Today's thin-skinned ego-driven weblogger may simply have been yesterday's Usenet faint heart, for example. And well-designed software can encourage better online participation: the DailyKos abandoned weblog software for the much more community-orientated Scoop system, and became the Slashdot of politics - only one where people say interesting things politely.) The settler iconography is no accident: the idea that everything "old fashioned" must be discarded, and everything is new again. "Like the American settlers, internet dwellers create a myth that there was no politics before they arrived," Will Davies pointed out, in a brilliant talk at NotCon this year. They needed to do this to ignore the fact that the land was already occupied. "To the same end, internet settlers choose to ignore the historical and sociological facts of how the internet is run, and who can't get on to it and why, and the mechanisms used online to divide people." Gated communities substitute group for social, and "cease to question the macro institutions and systems around them." The gated communities have already gone up, on the internet. One of its founding engineers, Karl Auerbach told your reporter earlier this year that physically, as well as sociologically, "The internet is balkanizing. Communities of trust are forming in which traffic is accepted only from known friends." Remind you of anything? What this leads to is a false sense of reality. Howard Dean supporters had a tremendous disappointment when man and message failed to resonate in Meatspace. The noise of online participation isn't a very reliable indicator of what people are really thinking or doing. "Everyone I know voted Democrat," people asked yesterday "How could this happen?" In fact, voter turnout rose little in prosperous areas with high broadband penetration, but dramatically in areas where broadband penetration was lowest: up over ten per cent in Mississippi, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico. Meanwhile, the cornerstones of civic life - community and church groups - were far more effective in getting out the vote. These delivered a Republican victory. So for Doctor Gillmor to prescribe the ailing patient 'more internet' is a strange choice. For him to advocate abandoning the US left's organizational vehicle (with one current useless owner, but a proven track record of some moderate success, if you look at the log book) makes senses only if, like Dan, you don't think think the left should have an effective vehicle at all. (He wants a "radical center", remember . On being asked to abandon the project, progressives might be tempted to echo Gandhi, who when asked what he thought of western civilization, replied "I think it would be a good idea!" Giving up barely after we've started, on a center ground defined by others, or by nothing but technology, isn't an adequate replacement. For some people, technology is the answer, no matter what the question may be. But Gillmor's reasons for wanting a new net party are rather like, to paraphrase Kennedy, asking not "what can the machines do for me?" but asking "what can I do for the machines?" . -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Did electronic voting pass the test?
by R.A. Hettinga 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/05/us_election_electronic_voting/print…> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register ; Internet and Law ; eGovernment ; Did electronic voting pass the test? By Robin Bloor, Bloor Research (robin.lettice at theregister.co.uk) Published Friday 5th November 2004 12:38 GMT At about the time that Senator John Kerry had accepted defeat and phoned President Bush to congratulate him, stories were circulating on the Internet claiming that the electronic voting machines in Florida and Ohio and some other states might have been rigged for a Bush victory. The claim stems from the fact that exit polls were indicating a marginal Kerry victory in those key states, but his apparent exit poll advantage was not reflected in the total vote count. This indeed was the shape of the story if you sat through the election night telethon. At first it looked as though Kerry was doing well, but as the night wore on a Bush victory became more and more likely. So what are we to think of the claim? Despite the "conspiracy theory", there is good reason to believe that it was a genuine Bush victory. First of all, the final outcome reflected the fact that Bush held a small lead in the opinion polls right up to election day. Although all of the individual polls were subject to a margin of error greater than Bush's lead, the aggregation of the polls was still slightly in favour of Bush (and this reduces the statistical error margin). The pollsters had been plagued by suggestions that they were not properly accounting for the youth vote and most, if not all of them, examined, re-examined and adjusted their weighting parameters in an attempt to account for the expected high youth vote for Kerry. The pollsters have a big self-interest in not being too far wrong. The indications, on election night itself, were that the level of disenfranchisement through technology failure, long lines of voting and voters being turned away from the polls for lack of proper credentials, was much lower than in 2000 and, although there may have been one or two areas where there were problems, there is no reason to believe that the election was skewed by such incidents. Another straw in the wind was the gambling money - which has historically provided a reasonable guide to an election's outcome. While it is illegal for most American's to place bets over the Internet (on anything), many of them do. Throughout the whole campaign the betting odds were in Bush's favour - in effect predicting a Bush victory simply by the weight of money that was gambling on that outcome. The figures for the total bets placed (on Betfair one of the leading sites for such bets) was $4.2m on Bush and $1.2m on Kerry. Finally, the results from Florida and Ohio, which were only marginally in Bush's favour were not particularly out of line with the voting in the US as a whole. As it worked out, these results seemed to reflect the mood of America. So what are we to think of the electronic voting "conspiracy theory"? Here too there are reasons to pause for thought. The companies that supply the machines (Diebold Election Systems, Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia Voting Systems) would destroy their own business if it were ever discovered that the technology was compromised. Would they take the risk? I personally doubt it, especially as it would involve bringing more than one or two people into the "conspiracy", any one of whom could go public on what was going down. Also, bending the software to affect the result in a very subtle way (and get it right) is probably very difficult to achieve. The margin for failure is high and the whole scheme is very risky. There is however legitimate cause for concern in the simple fact that many of the electronic voting machines that were deployed did not have audit trails that validated the figures they gave. If there were any kind of malfunction in any of these, there was simply no way to validate the figures. The justification for complete transparency and validation of voting technology is not only desirable but necessary. Indeed if ever there was a case for the open sourcing of program code then this is it. One hopes that by the time the next major elections in the US come round, there will be paper audit trails on every voting machine deployed. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Hedge Funds Are Bringing Democracy to the Financial World
by R.A. Hettinga 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB109986653339766981,00.html?mod=opi…> The Wall Street Journal November 8, 2004 BUSINESS EUROPE Hedge Funds Are Bringing Democracy to the Financial World By JEAN-MICHEL PAUL November 8, 2004 Assets under management by hedge funds have reached the $1 trillion mark, having grown at 20% a year since 1990. Hardly a day goes by without a new hedge fund being set up by a former trader or portfolio manager. This is the largest single structural change in the financial world since the coming of age of mutual funds at the beginning of the '80s. What we are in effect looking at is the beginning of a fundamental shift: the disintermediation of the role played by investment banks and their trading floors in particular. As technology allows set-up costs to dwindle and economies of scale to disappear, successful traders and portfolio managers, attracted by higher rewards, will continue to leave the large trading floors to set up shop offering formerly exclusive products to investors at large. In the process, a new market is being created and transaction costs decreased. Why and how is this happening? First and foremost, the hedge-fund revolution has been made possible by new technology that translated into a lower cost base. The sunk cost of starting and establishing a new investment and trading platform fund has literally collapsed -- as day traders well know. The Internet, together with the ever-increased capabilities of ever-cheaper computers and the democratization of programming and software skills, are enabling a few people to team up and create an efficient office at low cost. A team of two or three with a limited budget can now achieve what it would have taken dozens of people to do at considerably higher cost. Second, hedge funds are characterized by their asymmetric payoff. Managers typically get 2% of management fees and 20% of any performance achieved over a given benchmark. This incentive encourages the managers to perform, aligning investors' and managers' interest. It also means that the best traders will have an irrepressible incentive to set up their own hedge funds. The best performers will also have every interest in taking in as much money under management as they can without decreasing their performance. This means that asset allocation to traders and trading strategies is democratized and optimized. Investment banks have responded by embracing what they cannot prevent. They try to limit the brain drain by creating internal hedge-fund structures and to limit profitability decline by increasing the trading capital at risk. But beyond these defensive moves, they are inventing new roles for themselves as "platform provider," "prime broker" and even "capital introducers." This further modifies the financial landscape by allowing hedge funds to capitalize on the banks' distribution networks and customer access while maintaining their investment-decision independence. The keys to the banks' old trading-room environments were economies of scale, high sunk costs -- and professional asset allocation and supervision. Allocation is about optimal allocation of resources, chiefly capital, to the different strategies offered by the trading teams as opportunities come and go as the economic cycle unfolds. Risk control is about a constant independent review of the traders' positions, an ongoing assessment of the risk involved in the strategy. Upstart hedge funds have no risk-management departments but as traders set up independent hedge funds, risk control and asset allocation have been taken over by so-called funds of funds. These funds of funds, which receive funds from institutional investors and private banks, carry out repeated due diligence on hedge funds, looking for best of breeds. They also make regular quantitative and qualitative supervision control, so as to monitor ongoing risk-taking. Thanks to the expansion of the hedge-fund universe, trades and strategies that were yesterday the private backyard of investment banks are now, through hedge funds, available to traditional investors. This in itself creates for investors at large -- and chief among them pension funds and insurance -- a seemingly new asset class, that is a set of financial instruments whose payoff is fundamentally different and decorrelated from the traditional long-only approach. But the hedge fund world is not problem free. A question often associated with the hedge-fund transformation is capacity. By this, it is meant that the ability of a hedge fund to accommodate new investors while maintaining returns will diminish. There is no doubt that for "traditional" investments this is true. Similarly, as more and more "traders" arbitrage the same inefficiencies, these disappear, together with the arbitrage profits. This phenomenon explains a significant part of the lackluster results of the hedge-fund industry as a whole so far this year compared to former years. But because of the lower set-up costs, the lighter structure and higher incentives, ideas for new strategies are appearing and being deployed faster than ever before. This enables a continuous stream of new, if temporary, superior returns as start-up fund exploit new strategies. In other words, the law of creative destruction applies to hedge funds too, ensuring that new "alternative" funds will continuously replace overcrowded traditional alternative strategies. A related genuine concern is the increased level of leverage observed in the industry. As the industry develops to play its role as a significant asset class, some hedge funds, and indeed funds of funds, unable to find new markets to generate the uncorrelated alpha, the industry holy grail, continue to play their traditional market in an ever increasing leveraged way. But a leveraged position is bound to increase volatility. This, in turn, as was shown in the famous LTCM debacle, is bound to translate into failures from time to time. This is all the more the case because most positions will exhibit a strong correlation in a liquidity crisis. Indeed, hedge-fund failures are likely to become more common going forward, if only because the sheer number of hedge funds has increased. Similarly, pressure on hedge-fund margins is bound to increase. These corrections are also part of the market maturing and should be welcomed. Hedge funds are here to stay. The investment-disintermediation paradigm is based on a financial-industry reorganization that offers the prospect for a more efficient and transparent market as well as access to new investable asset classes. Its implications are as important to the financial sector as the appearance of the high-yield market in the 1980s was to the corporate-bond industry. Mr. Paul is a senior analyst at Atlas Capital Group. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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37 arrested in net gun swoop
by R.A. Hettinga 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/05/met_guns_net/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT 37 arrested in net gun swoop By Tim Richardson (tim.richardson at theregister.co.uk) Published Friday 5th November 2004 15:02 GMT Thirty-seven people have been arrested after the Metropolitan Police seized more than 100 firearms in a crackdown on weapons traded online. Some 700 addresses have been raided over the last four days as officers mounted the UK-wide operation. In all, 86 handguns, ten rifles, three machine guns, seven shotguns, 13 stun guns and a crossbow were nabbed in Operation Bembridge. Class A drugs were also seized during the raids. Said Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, Head of the Met's Specialist Crime Directorate: "This is the climax of a long-term intelligence operation where we have identified weaponry purchased over the Internet. I am delighted by its success and the sheer number of firearms, ammunition and other weapons seized will make London a safer city." The apparent ease to which guns are available online was highlighted this week by a Labour MP who compiled a list of handguns he claims were for sale on internet auction site, eBay. Steve McCabe, MP for Birmingham Hall Green, has called on eBay to pay closer attention to goods for sale on its pages after he was able to buy an air rifle on the auction site last month. He told the House of Commons: "The other week, it was possible for me to buy a gun from the eBay internet site. The way in which the sellers work is simple. They advertise an empty bag or box. The buyer bids for that bag or box, and when that is done, the seller throws in the gun for free. "This site is being used to facilitate a trade in illegal weapons," he said in a call for the Home Secretary to take action. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Dimpled Chips
by R.A. Hettinga 08 Nov '04

08 Nov '04

<http://www.thecrimson.com/today/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=504331> The Harvard Crimson Online :: Print Article Originally published on Monday, November 08, 2004 in the Opinion section of The Harvard Crimson. Dimpled Chips By MATTHEW A. GLINE MATTHEW A. GLINE It seems perfectly reasonable that election officials in Palm Beach County, Fla. would have wanted a change in their voting equipment after the 2000 election. And touchscreen voting machines seemed like an obvious choice: Confusing butterfly ballots that had made the state a national laughing-stock were replaced by clear, well-labeled, brightly colored buttons; the machines were backed by the latest developments in counting technology (a field which has, somewhat counter-intuitively, apparently seen a fair bit of action in recent years); and most importantly of all, the nearest Chad would now be the one in North Africa. What the election officials were probably not expecting, however, was the experience of one particular Palm Springs voter, who after patiently tapping through screen after screen of national and local officials fulfilling her civic duty was presented with an unsatisfying message of all too familiar a form: "Vote save error #1," the machine said, "use back-up voting procedure." Voteprotect.org is a website run by a handful of nonprofit organizations including VerifiedVoting.org and the Electronic Frontier Foundation which collected and organized reports of voting irregularities during last Tuesday's election. A cursory look at their data on problems related to the voting machines themselves reveals some interesting trends. The entire state of Massachusetts, where votes are recorded in large part by older optical scanning equipment, reported a total of 7 such incidents out of nearly 3 million ballots-one for every 500,000 or so votes cast. Palm Beach County had 27 machine related incidents out of their 550,000 votes-each voter there was roughly three times more likely to report trouble with their equipment than a voter was here. These incidents ran the severity gamut. In Georgia, where all voting is done on touchscreen machines, voters complained of long lines due to malfunctioning machines or machines with dead batteries. There were complaints of slow machines, and machines which at first refused to accept the "smart cards" each voter used to identify themselves. Some machines crashed or went blank while they were being used. Some machines, however, had bigger issues: "Voter's machine defaulted to Republican candidate each time she voted for a Democrat," one report from Cobb County, Georgia reads. "She told the precinct supervisor about the problem. It continued to happen 7 times." Similar incidents occurred in reasonably large numbers-some voters tried to push a button for Kerry or Bush and found that the X would appear next to the name of the other candidate. These problems were probably not due to a vast right-wing conspiracy in the voting machine industry. (Though it's not entirely clear that such a conspiracy doesn't exist-a board member of Diebold Election Systems, the company which makes most of the touchscreen voting systems that have been deployed, did at one point guarantee he would deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004. The promise sounds even more ominous in hindsight.) Rather, most of the issues surrounded poor "calibration" of the touchscreen inputs-the machines would register taps on one part of the screen as if they had been taps at some slightly different point. There were technicians on hand who could recalibrate the machines, and this tended to fix the problems for subsequent voters. Still, as a result these machines relied on voters' being sufficiently astute to notice when the confirmation said something different than what they had chosen, and sufficiently persistent to duke it out with the machines and complain to overworked officials when things went wrong. And for all the effort on the part of Florida officials to escape "close calls" due to fuzzy voting tools, these errors sound a lot like the dimpled chads they endeavored to replace. Or they would, were it not for one more disquieting feature of most touchscreen voting equipment deployed in this election. Senator Kerry graciously conceded on Wednesday morning. But had he decided to fight it out and asked for hand recounts, it's not clear what this would mean with respect to the new machines: They produce no printed receipt. In fact, they leave no paper trail at all. A lawsuit fought out in the Florida court system over the past six months tried to change this fact, but election officials have ultimately refused to deploy such equipment, calling it a frivolous expense. I don't mean to doubt that President Bush won this election fairly, and I don't think touchscreen voting machines, for all their irregularities, tipped any balances. They even carried some ancillary benefits: Disabled persons, the blind in particular, were able to vote unassisted in a presidential election in large numbers for the first time in American history. Still, we need to be able to trust the machines we use to vote. This doesn't mean we need to understand how they work-no one should have to know that their voting machine employs strong cryptography to keep their votes safe. It does, however, mean that in our fleeting interaction with the machines, we have to be made confident they're doing what they're supposed to do. We don't, for the most part, trust our computers. We save often, we're told to run virus-scanning software-and still, we hear stories about lost theses and long treks in the snow to find working printers. But I think it's quite clear at this point that while it takes a few days (and maybe a letter grade or two hit) to rewrite a history paper, it can take years to recover from a presidential election. Matthew A. Gline '06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Mondays. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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