I love to eat at Le Bistro. It’s a fantastic place on Priory Road, just five minutes walk from my home. This restaurant has plenty of atmosphere even when it’s quiet. The food is excellent and the service is prompt and friendly. The manager and staff make a point of getting to know all their regular customers.
I took this photo with my new handy-dandy Nikkor F1.8 50mm lens. On a digital camera it behaves more like a 70mm lens (because the sensor is much smaller than a 35mm film), however I think it yields some interesting and delightful results.
Resonance FM is now Podcasting. A selection of the finest shows on Resonance, plus a few that have not yet been broadcast are now available for download. Of particular interest is Kevin Eldon’s new series “Speakers”. My personal favourites Hooting Yard and The Exciting Hellebore Shew.
After watching this video testemony you do not have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that the world’s largest democracy is riddled with corruption. In this video we see a former employee of Yang Enterprises (a government it contractor) state under oath that his firm was comissioned by a Republican congressman to build software capable of throwing a ballot and hiding the tampering.
He describes in some detail the technology and principles of how the software works. He states his reasons for believing that this software was actually used in the Ohio 2004 congressional elections. It all seems technically credible. Even if there was reason to doubt this individual’s testemony, the fact that everything he suggests is theoretically possible gives ample reason for concern.
Of course this is stating the utterly obvious: I think this illustrates clearly the need for an auditable paper trail in any form of eVoting system. Without a non-controversial means of auditing the ballot in a form that cannot easily be tampered with, it is quite clear that this sort of thing is going to keep happening. I think this is also the worst-case scenario of what happens when critical components of democracy are implemented as closed-source software. How on earth can we trust any electronic ballot when the results are so easy to falsify?