Posts by Frank Oz

Voteware source code review 'could lead to hacking'

Re: Once a trouble maker always...

360,000 lines of Visual Basic is what's being reported.

Visual Basic? Brilliant for its scalability, ease of maintenance, security, currency and large systems capabilities. For the code necessary to determine out electoral voting, elect our Senate and safeguard our democracy?

The AEC are amateurs, and I wouldn't trust them to code my bowel movements ... let alone a system for counting votes. And if you don't trust the electoral process, you don't trust the governments elected using that process, and it all starts to fall to pieces.

Amateur Hour ...

Oh God!

If its that vulnerable, it really is amateur hour in the AEC ... and they should never even consider instituting an electronic voting system.

I mean, if you're that incompetent at coding and setting up security you shouldn't even be thinking of using IT.

Interview: Michael Cordover, voteware freedom-of-information crusader

Without trust ...

... We would sink into anarchy.

The AEC seems to forget that. You'd think, after the recent WA debacle, that it would be uppermost on their collective minds ... but the AEC seems to think that 'it's all OK now, the electorate trusts us, the politicians trusts us ... she's apples.'

Wrong. Trust is something you build and reinforce constantly.

And I'd like you to imagine what happened in Republican governed Florida to Al Gore, and in subsequent elections in the same state, when their electronic voting machines proved to be less than fair and correct in registering the results and calculating the vote.

Now imagine that happened to the AEC ... following on the disasters that have occurred with the manual system in a number of electorates of late. And if public trust in the AEC evaporates, so does trust in the election results ... and I'll leave you to imagine what that could do in the increasingly fractious and politically divided country that Australia has become over the last 10 years.

The smart move by the AEC would be to release the code for review ... the stupid move would be to withhold it. Because if they did, and if mistakes and errors, or, even worse bias and corrupted process, were subsequently proved or eve just suspected in the electronic electoral process ... I doubt the AEC would survive.

Five eyes spies good for us: Tony Abbott

You gotta love this guy. His hypocrisy knows no bounds.

It benefits 'us', so its OK to use it wholesale against 'them'.

And if 'them' includes his own citizens ... that's OK. As long as his 'us' (by which I assume he means his party, other politicians, and their backers) isn't spied upon ... everything is hunky dory.

Apple: Scrubbing may not yet have cleansed iThings of BLOOD

And we now wait for the Reg's pronouncements on ...

Sony, Microsoft, Samsung, Dell, Lenovo, and a horde of other hardware manufacturers who source their manufacturing and materials overseas.

And we wait, in interest, for a comparative study of multiple hardware manufacturers for their across the board controls, assurances and hardware manufacturing processes together with their third party suppliers.

That would be investigative journalism.

Pop OS X Mavericks on your Mac for FREE while you have LUNCH

Mixed bag

I installed it, and have a couple of comments:

a) iBooks is pretty porked at the moment. It wouldn't import my library from iTunes, and only imported the books bought at the iTunes store or from my iPad. Hundreds of other books bought from DRM free sources (e.g. Baen) in the States were ignored ... or when I forced an import (by dragging and dropping the iTunes Books directory onto the iBooks window) told me that I wasn't authorised for many of these books ... presumably because it didn't like the fact that there was no DRM. As for PDF's and other files in te iTunes library ... forget it, didn't even recognise them. Factor in that AppNap doesn't seem to apply to iBooks on the Mac (it often blew out to take 100% of CPU cycles) and I have to believe that iBooks is a work-in-progress. That said, and given that it is now the content manager for book and literature thingies for all IOS devices, iBooks could very easily become another Maps debacle if Apple doesn't fix it 'real soon now'.

b) The puppy just grinds to a halt spontaneously with little or no pattern observable. Most of the time it shows me it's using bugger all CPU time, and then all of a sudden something kicks in that blows the CPU usage out of the water. Still trying to track this down.

c) The latest version of iTunes (11.1.2) has serious code optimisation problems as well ... and can also bring the Mac to a screeching halt. Given that iTunes is the focal point for all other content management - other than what iBooks took over, Apple is now batting a thousand with literature, music, movies and apps management ... in a really bad way.

d) Little glitches and bugs abound, but I expect these will get fixed over time ... at the moment it's Apple's content management system that's causing me all the grief.

d)

Turnbull floats e-vote, compulsory ID

Re: Forced to vote for one of these morons

I'm with you.

For the Lower House in my electorate I had a choice between the two major parties (both of which disgust me), a couple of fundamentalist Christian loons, a Family Party guy (another fundamentalist loon), and a couple of myopic single purpose candidates whose policies were so far 'out there' that they were technically unelectable. For the Senate (unless I voted 'above the line for one of the major parties) I had to make a choice between 100 odd (and many were really 'odd') candidates most of whom I would prefer seeing consigned to Her Majesty's Pleasure rather than the Senate.

I simply decided to fold up both pieces of paper without despoiling them with my vote, and whack them in the boxes. My 'informal' vote was therefore a protest vote ... but thanks to the politicians in this country who won't allow the protest vote to be counted as anything but 'informal' on election night, we'll never know how many like minded people there were on 7 September.