(previous month)

20061002 05

For those of you who would rather read my not-a-blog via a feed, now you can. For those of you who would rather not, my not-a-blog will remain here for the foreseeable future.

Forget all that! From now on, my random ramblings that you rarely read can be read at http://dodgysoftware.net/users/mike/wp/.

20061002 04

More on voting, again via Schneier.

My question is how well such a system would work given various preferential voting systems, real and proposed.

The good thing is that smart people are thinking about this sort of thing. The bad thing is that generally not very smart people are responsible for this sort of thing.

20061002 03

One of the phone lines, one that I never answer, rings and rings and rings. Finally I answer it so I can tell the goddamn telemarketer to shove a goddamn steak knife up his butt...

me: ¿Bueno?
caller: Err, emm, hi, this is Chris Xxxxx, I'm looking for a lady who called me, but unfortunately I don't have her name. She works at the British Consulate. She's in her fifties. She looks Mexican. She's in her fifties and looks Mexican. She just called me, but didn't leave her name and I need to get in touch with her.
me: I think you have the wrong number.
Chris Xxxxx: This, this isn't the British Consulate?
me: Er, no, it isn't. You have the wrong number. Sorry.
Chris Xxxxx: Oh, sorry. Thank you.

Easily the strangest wrong number I've answered, in any country. The vast opportunities for mischief did not occur to me until after I'd hung up.

It makes me wonder what he was expecting, though. If he were an American calling the US Embassy, and had actually gotten the right number, I can't imagine him getting very helpful treatment.

(More on the sins of the US Embassy in Mexico City later, once Alma is granted her visa. It's been approved, but I want to wait until the process is closed and she can legally enter the US before writing anything else about it. It won't be positive.)

20061002 02

From dailynews.com:

The software developed for InkaVote is proprietary software. All the software developed by vendors is proprietary. I think it's odd that some people don't want it to be proprietary. If you give people the open source code, they would have the directions on how to hack into it. We think the proprietary nature of the software is good for security.

That proprietary software would be more secure makes intuitive sense to many people, but it's false. A lot of people think that all software is inherently buggy, or at least that all software has bugs. I think I disagree: tools and practice are still developing. Right now they are not very good, but some day they will be.

However, I think recognizing that bugs can exist is critial to good software quality. It is a big part of why open source software tends to be less buggy than its proprietary equivalents. Recognizing the potential existence of bugs also leads to more robust designs and implementations at macro and micro levels. (Macro: a system being comprised of minimally coupled components that don't trust each other, etc, cf qmail and postfix. Micro: high level languages, and not using the string functions in libc.) So, interestingly, future recognition of the possibility of bugs will, in my opinion, play the biggest role in them not being as common in the future.

So, some day, when software in general is a lot more reliable, open and peer-reviewed software will still be the best stuff. Voting software is no exception. More importantly, hiding how the voting system works goes very much against any reasonable conception of democracy.

(Link, but not my half-assed analysis, via Bruce Schneier's blog.)

20061002 01

I've visited Oaxaca and the end of the past three years. I don't think I'll be going this year, though.