Politicked Off

Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist.

Full article @ Miami Herald

Terry Hancock writes:

Somebody recently noted that, what with all the bombing and killing and tyrannical madness going on in the world, how can we waste all this time talking about free software? Surely there’s more important stuff to worry about?

Well, they’re absolutely right that there are bigger problems in the world. When I get a chance to do something more direct about it, I plan to. So far, it looks like voting is about it, though.

On the other hand, you can’t trivialize peacetime matters. Peace is more important than stopping war. It’s the thing we need to protect when we deal with the evils in the world.

Regrettably, peace usually works the soft and slow way, while war is swift and always seems like the simpler solution. Hence our constant error in trying to make wars to stop wars. It is always a mistake to try to stop the processes of peace just because war seems more urgent. Because peace is what actually stops wars.

Free software does, in my opinion, make significant strides forward in creating long-term peace for humanity. A web, constructed of free software now connects us all, enemies and friends alike—and people who used to be enemies are becoming friends. Or perhaps only their children are.

This is the real thing that those “evil internet chat rooms” are doing to our children: they are connecting them. They’re allowing people who wouldn’t talk to each other before the chance to do so in relative safety, unencumbered by distance. They’re allowing them to come to terms with each other on a personal, down-to-Earth level like nothing else can. It makes a difference when you know that the “foreigner” with the odd skin color and the funny-looking clothes has a name and a pet hamster named “Rodrigo”.

The thing breeding in those internet chat rooms is surely the power-mongerers of the world’s worst nightmare: it’s a new generation of people who are beginning to think of their race as “Human” and their nation as “Earth”. I’m not saying we’re there yet, but there is something happening. Something that happens through shared experiences and exchanged knowledge. Something personal that treaties and laws and propaganda ministers can’t get to. People are talking to each other.

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What did people say in 1498? Well, they said only, “How wonderful it is to have all these new books.” Those same people were engaged in turning the known world inside out, but they didn’t for a minute see what they were doing.

And what are people saying in 1998? Well, we’ve watched technology turning us inside out for about 200 years now. So we expect the computer to change us. But technology has never been predictable. We always miss the point. Visionaries looked at transportation in 1948 and predicted we’d have a helicopter in every garage by 1960. They looked at the new computers in 1960 and predicted that one big mother computer would organize the world by 1980. We never get the future right.

Today, visionaries fall oddly quiet while the rest us of run about saying Gee Whiz, look at how much information our children can access. The real changes that the computer is bringing about are changes in the way we see reality. And we do not yet have an adult generation that’s known the computer from the cradle. All of us see the computer against the background of the not-computer. All of us typed before we word-processed. All of us learned the algorithms of arithmetic before we used hand calculators. All of us see the PC against the backdrop of a world without it. What we cannot see at all is how a mind will work when it’s never known anything but the PC.

Continue here

Hush, little blogger, don’t say a word,
It’s best you become part of the mindless herd.
And if you feel the need for a political rant,
Mama’s going to recommend you keep it scant.
And if you continue to question authority,
DHS will consider your unlawful captivity.
And if this warning won’t keep you mum,
Government’s going to classify you a terrorist scum.
And if you still think your speech is free,
Try selling 9-11 as a conspiracy.
Your NSA file will have an “enemy combatant” stamp,
And soon you’ll be heading off to a detention camp.
So if you know what’s good for you,
Keep your posts in check and your attitude too.
Now shut your mouth and watch Fox News,
Enjoy your IQ drop and let it be your muse.

Check out the olive ream for more great content.

New electronic voting machines have arrived in Yolo County, Calif., but there is one hitch: the audio program for the visually impaired in some of them works only in Vietnamese.

“Talk about panic,” said Freddy Oakley, the county’s top election official. “I’ve got gray-haired ladies as poll workers standing around looking stunned.”

As dozens of states are enforcing new voter registration laws and switching to paperless electronic voting systems, officials across the country are bracing for an Election Day with long lines and heightened confusion, followed by an increase in the number of contested results…….

……Arizona, California, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania are among the states considered most likely to experience difficulties, according to voting experts who have been tracking the technology and other election changes.

Continue reading @ NY Times

Priceton University presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine. Scroll down the page for an easy to eat video of their findings.

It’s also interesting to note that two of the huge electronic voting machine manufacturers (Diebold being one of them) have heavy connections to the GOP and particularly Bush and ze gang.

The CEO of Diebold, Walden O’Dell, has even made extraordinary statements that he is “committed to delivering Ohio’s electorate votes to the President in this year’s election.”

Weeks later it comes out that the access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet. If you have a jukebox, locking minibar, or even locking drawers in your office, you may already have a key that will work!

One final trail for you to follow:

Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold’s election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a “patch,” a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. “We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn’t do,” Hood says. “The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done.”

If you decide to vote and enounter any problems dial (1-866-OUR-VOTE).

S. 3930 passed just before Congress adjourned to campaign for re-election. They passed it to show they were tough on terrorism. But it effectively repeals the Bill of Rights. It permits the federal government to . . .

• “Disappear” anyone (including American citizens)
• Detain them indefinitely without recourse to legal defense
• Torture them
• Try them without due process
• Punish them, also without due process

The entire bill is bad, but the “killer” passage is subsection ii which defines an Unlawful Enemy Combatant as anyone . . .

“who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.”

1. This section makes it clear that this law applies to anyone appointed bureaucrats label an “enemy combatant.” That could be you.
2. There’s no limit to application of this law. It could be applied to anyone at anytime — war or no war.
3. Notice also that this new law is retroactive. You could have done something to violate this law before it even became a law.
4. Please also notice that the President is given the authority to create another “competent tribunal” to make these decisions if he or she is not satisfied with the efforts of the Combatant Status Review Tribunal. In other words, the President can create other tribunals, not even governed by this law, as long as he declares them to be “competent” to make decisions about who should be disappeared, detained, tortured, tried and punished, all without recourse to a legal defense.

Please be clear about what this all means . . .

You could be disappeared at anytime, detained and tortured, forever, and no one need ever know what became of you.

You were told this law would only apply to non-citizens. You were told a deal was being struck to make the bill less oppressive. Congress lied on both counts. The deal they struck actually made the law worse.

You were informed by the mainstream media that you could trust Senator McCain to protect you because he had once been tortured in Vietnam, but Senator McCain did not protect you. He betrayed you. He agreed to make this law worse, not better.

The final version of this law actually repeals the entire Bill of Rights for everyone; citizens and non-citizens alike. The only right you still retain is the protection against being forced to quarter troops in your home.

Please help by heading to Downsize DC to contact your local representative demanding that this bill be repealed immediately.

Want to catch a senator napping during a congressional hearing? Or letting a possible racial slur slip out at a campaign rally?

Then log on to Internet video-sharing Web sites like YouTube.com — the latest weapon in U.S. politics where a candidate’s missteps can be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

Political campaigns for the November 7 congressional elections have sent out mass e-mails with links to videos of opponents in unscripted, often embarrassing, situations.

Some campaigns have even dispatched young staffers known as “trackers” armed with video cameras. Their sole job is to track a rival candidate’s every move and make sure their cameras are rolling in case the politician makes a gaffe.

Politicians caught on Internet candid camera

Conrad Burns’ Naptime

Platewire is a public repository and electronic forum of drivers by drivers. Using a drivers license plate, commuters can communicate their thoughts and feelings in regards to driving on todays’ roadways. Report and flag bad drivers, award good drivers, and even flirt with cute drivers. PlateWire was born out of frustration from years of driving along side drivers who seem to have no concern with anyone’s safety, including their own.

While this site is currently just a nice place to vent, this could easily be adapted in the next few years to tie in with a consumer version of the IR cameras currently in police cars. With the emerging long distance wireless network technologies, your car could constantly update you on your GPS screen with warnings about the drivers around you, gathered from databases on the internet.

You can already call their toll free number to report drivers on the road - 1(866)689-2155. You will have to retrieve it later on the website to post the plate number. Once speech recognition technology reaches open-source status, one can imagine dictating into the phone and having it entered automatically on the website.

Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years.

Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.

He predicted that “truth predictor” software would, within five years, “hold politicians to account.” People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.

“One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,” he told the newspaper.

Full story at Reuters

Web powered widget-enabled TV, anyone?  Who’s going to hack a slingbox?