The California Secretary of State recently mandated that evoting machines used in California will need to print a paper receipt that allow voters to verify their votes and auditors to verify election results.
This is a tremendous step forward for safer evoting and a major victory for activists in California.
The need for paper voting receipts is pure common sense. A adversary who is able to modify the results of an election could also modify the electronic logs. Without a paper trail, there’s no way to track or fix things if the system is compromised.
The need for open code and open processes in the voting system is also a matter of common sense.
Try out this sentence: “in a democracy, the voting process should be a secret.” Doesn’t make any sense, does it? Try again: “In a democracy, the voting process conducted with computers should be secret.” Adding computers to the mix doesn’t change the need for an open voting process.
Hopefully the progress in California will provide impetus to activists in other states, and to the Holt Bill in Congress, which mandates these safeguards nationwide.
Nifty community blog navigator
Chip Rosenthal put together an awesome weblog navigator for the Austin metablog. A new, handy sidebar lists the participating bloggers, and can also sort by number of Technorati links, Google Reference count, last posting date, alpha, and more.
Three cheers for open web service APIs, community social software innovation, and Chip.
Austin moments
Classic Austin moment at a Nathan Wilcox brunch on Sunday morning — walked in, to find Jon Lebkowsky, EFF-Austin co-conspirator, deep in conversation with Erik Josowitz, the person who hired me at Vignette and brought me here.
There are two flavors of this classic moment:
1) finding that two people you know from different contexts are old friends going back a decade or two
2) finding that two people you know from different contexts are old enemies going back a decade or two.
Semantic Web aphorisms
from the much-discussed Semantic Web essay
In order for the Semantic web to work, you would need “a world where language is merely math done with words”
“Any attempt at a global ontology is doomed to fail, because meta-data describes a worldview. ”
David Weinberger
I don’t think Clay is arguing that all metadata is bad. Rather, he’s saying that it doesn’t scale. Yes, the insurance industry might be able to construct a taxonomy that works for it, but the Semantic Web goes beyond the local. It talks about how local taxonomies can automagically knit themselves together. The problem with the Semantic Web is, from my point of view, that it can’t scale because taxonomies are tools, not descriptions, and thus don’t knit real well.
Shelley, from Sam Ruby’s comments
There is a big difference between deliberate metadata, and accidental metadata, and if semantic web relied purely on accidental metadata, then we have it — it is called Google.
well, yes, exactly
The pace of blogging
Last weekend, I reassured my mom that I’m ok and not really working too hard. Then Ross publishes this.
Ladies Auxiliary
Over the weekend, I read The Ladies Auxiliary, a novel set in the Orthodox community in Memphis.
A young widow moves into town with a young child. Batsheva is a convert whose husband had grown up in the Memphis community. She moves in because she wants to participate and raise her child in the warm, close observant community that her husband grew up in. But she doesn’t fit in. She wears gauzy clothes and bangles. She paints abstract paintings. She sings loudly and with spirit in synagogue. She doesn’t cook. She’s earnest about seeking meanings in Jewish ritual.
After initial caution, the community slowly warms to her, and she’s invited to teach art to the sullen and surly teenage highschool girls. Things go awry when she becomes close to the girls, who are rebelling against the community’s strict norms, and to the Rabbi’s 22-year old son who is having a crisis of faith. The community bands together to blame the outsider for the cracks in the community facade.
The book has an insider’s description of the hybrid styles of Memphis Jewish life — the lavish eastern european/southeastern american cooking, the modest yet ostentatious frum-southern belle dress code. The book portrays the universal insular, gossip-ruled, iron-clad norms of small town life, enforced by particularly Jewish-flavored anxieties about keeping community boundaries by maintaining the appearance of observance, avoiding the “bad influence” of the outside world, and defining parental success by the observance level of their children.
The author’s portrait of the Memphis Jewish women at various, nuanced levels of insider and outsiderhood rings very true to me. There are women who embody and enforce the values; women who live them by subordinating their opinions to the group, and women with unresolved tension about keeping up the appearance of observance, happy family life, and wanting outlets for creativity and initiative. So does the clash between the culturally conservative, emotionally restrained Memphians and the spiritually and culturally expressive and exploratory New York, neo-Hassidic Carlebach community where Batsheva learned her Judaism.
The portrait of the outsider has a bit of insider bias. Batsheva led a geographically and spiritually rootless life before finding Judaism. After conversion, she has little contact with her parents or former friends. Yet she is portrayed as having grace, self-confidence, and the wisdom of her experience and intuitions, though she is rather tone-deaf to her affect on others, and has no political skills other than native trust and friendliness.
A more plausible outsider would either be less emotionally stable — manipulative, mercurial, erratic. Or alternatively, more grounded, with stronger ties to her family, to friends from the Carlebach community, to college and art-world friends; and a few more political skills.
My cousin lives in the Memphis Orthodox community. She recommended the book. I’ll ask her what she thinks. Being a work of fiction, it dramatizes and exaggerates the truth, but the caricature rings true to me.
This portrait of Memphis is why I don’t go there often and don’t stay long. The cultural categories I fit into are “eccentric”; in a community that has little tolerance for eccentricity; and “bad influence”.
Metrics of eccentricity include being a female entrepreneur and political activist, in a world where public life is for men, and women keep to their place, which can include heavy behind-the-scenes influence, but no direct public voice. Female intellectualism is considered quite odd and somewhat absurd. A single woman in her thirties is considered deeply suspicious, or is disregarded entirely.
Metrics of bad influence include friends and associates of various ethnicities, religious and sexual preferences; libertarian principles about others’ choices, and personal religious and sexual preferences that are rather conservative by American coastal norms but radical in the Jewish Bible Belt. OK as long as they’re not spoken in public; you don’t want to stay around long enough to have people find out what you think; or alternately, get in the habit of keeping up appearances.
New Coates Blog on Forum Moderation
Tom Coates of plasticbag.org fame has started Everything in Moderation, a new blog about forum moderation.
Very interesting topic — the social practices around online communication are at least as important as the tools we use.
via Nancy White.
The Idea of Decline in Western History
Pundits on the right and left agree that civilization is a perilous state of decline, although they disagree about why.
* A permissive, hedonistic culture has led to pervasive moral degradation, irresponsibility, and the collapse of traditional family values
* Rampant destruction of the earth’s resources is leading to imminent collapse of the planet’s ability to sustain civilization
In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman traces three hundred years of history of the idea that Western civilization is on the verge of collapse.
Beyond Fear
Just read Beyond Fear, by Bruce Schneier, the computer security expert. Schneier describes his method for evaluating and countering security threats, and applies them to the policies in place responding to September 11.
One of the things that I really like about Schneier is that he asserts that most people are moral and ethical, even as he analyzes the vulnerabilities of systems to attack.
One reason that I had avoided the security topic in the past is that the conversation seemed to be driven by Tom Clancy-style paranoia. People who talked about security had a typical introductory spiel explaining that the world is a much more dangerous place than most people assume; security professionals live on the edge; protecting the unsuspecting flock from the terror that lurks outside, using complex, secret knowledge. Security experts portray a glamorous image of a elite, living in a world of fear, and attempting to impart that frisson of terror to their audience.
By contrast, Schneier presents a sensible and logical way of looking at risks, protection strategies, and trade-offs. He makes a cogent argument that it is important to have security professionals with practice recognizing situations that are rare to most people. He presents the complexity involved in analysis and defence. And he puts those risks in context; he portrays a world in which serious danger is not wholly preventable, but subject to mitigation, and mostly rare.
Email is about group-forming
John Udell’s instant classic:
Every interpersonal e-mail message creates, or sustains, or alters the membership of a group. It happens so naturally that we don’t even think about it. When you’re writing a message to Sally, you cc: Joe and Beth. Joe adds Mark to the cc: list on his reply. You and Sally work for one department of your company, Joe for another, Beth is a customer, and Mark is an outside contractor. These subtle and spontaneous acts of group formation and adjustments of group membership are the source of e-mail’s special power. Without any help from an administrator, we transcend the boundaries not only of time and space but also of organizational trust.
An ad-hoc group convened by e-mail dissolves unless membership is reaffirmed by each message. This is a feature, not a bug. Many of the groups that perform work in a modern organization are transient. A hallway conversation is over in minutes; a spontaneous collaboration can last a day; a project may take a week. Software that requires people to explicitly declare the formation of these groups, and to acknowledge their dissolution, is too blunt an instrument for such ephemeral social interaction. Like an operating-system thread, an e-mail thread is a lightweight construct, cheap to set up and tear down.