taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Voting: None Dare Call It Stolen - Ohio, the Election, and America’s Servile Press, by Mark Crispin Miller.

Miller and many others have obviously been spending a lot of work chasing down each incident in Ohio since last November, and there’s quite a lot of them. It’s impressive the degree to which recounts were evaded, if these allegations are true. There’s many shocking cases alleged than I could really fit here — but here’s some of the lowest points:

On December 13, 2004, it was reported by Deputy Director of Hocking County Elections Sherole Eaton, that a Triad GSI employee had changed the computer that operated the tabulating machine, and had “advised election officials how to manipulate voting machinery to ensure that preliminary hand recount matched the machine count.” This same Triad employee said he worked on machines in Lorain, Muskingum, Clark, Harrison, and Guernsey counties.

it strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a course of behavior to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets told them how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law.

In Union County, Triad replaced the hard drive on one tabulator. In Monroe County, “after the 3 percent hand count had twice failed to match the machine count, a Triad employee brought in a new machine and took away the old one. (That machine’s count matched the hand count.)”

The willingness to throw away functioning, reliable election systems, and replacing them with new, easy-to-subvert ones, is astounding. But on top of that, when concerned parties investigate and find danger signs, it’s easily buried:

Miller emphasizes that, even after the National Election Data Archive Project, on March 31, 2005, “released its study demonstrating that the exit polls had probably been right, it made news only in the Akron Beacon-Journal,” while “the thesis that the exit polls were flawed had been reported by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Columbus Dispatch, CNN.com, MSNBC, and ABC.”

Miller’s conclusion: ‘the press has unilaterally disarmed’.

Tags: count, dare, election, employee, hand, lot, machine, none, recount, triad, voting

Patents: Ian Clarke copied the FSFE-IE mailing list with a good mail he sent to Mairead McGuinness MEP, detailing the current state of proposed fixes to the European software patenting directive. He discusses a comment from an Ericsson employee asking for software patentability:

It may be the case that this employee was concerned about Ericsson’s ability to compete against smaller competitors if Ericsson cannot use software patents against them. I would argue that it is not the responsibility of any EU institution to protect Ericsson against legitimate competition from other companies, indeed competition must be encouraged. Software patents will have a stifling effect on competition in Europe, and this is why some large companies like Ericsson are strong advocates for this directive.

And a brief overview of the amendments we want:

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, an organisation whose line we endorse, has prepared an analysis of the amendments, indicating which will help to ensure that software patents do not become patentable, and which will not. This document may be downloaded here.

In particular, we support the position and amendments of Piia Noora Kauppi MEP, who has taken a strong position against the introduction of software patents within the EPP group, and also the position of Michel Rocard MEP who is the rapporteur for this Directive.

The only other thing it misses, in my opinion, is a paragraph discussing the ‘as such’ loophole that has been heavily relied upon by most pro-swpat politicians recently — the trick of saying ‘this directive does not permit software patenting, as such‘.

Indeed, it does not permit patenting of all software techniques, but instead permits the patenting of software techniques as long as it is of ‘a technical nature’ — without defining what that means. Given that it’s clearly arguable that all software is technical, and since patent offices earn money based on the patents they accept, rather than those they reject, this is a loophole the size of a bus. Many of the desired amendments concern cleaning up this obvious omission.

Anyway, here’s the full text of Ian’s mail from the list archive.

Tags: competition, directive, employee, ericsson, fsfe-ie, list, mailing, mep, patents, position, software

Ah, some good old-fashioned sleazy MS stuff:

Chris O’Rourke, a Microsoft employee, described attending LinuxWorld, a trade fair in California, where he ‘purported to be an independent computer consultant’ working with several public school districts, according to an e-mail message he sent on Aug. 20, 2002. ‘In general, people bought this without question,’ Mr. O’Rourke wrote. ‘Hook, line and sinker.’

He said his goal was to glean intelligence about the competition. His guise, Mr. O’Rourke said, ‘got folks to open up and talk.’ Mr. O’Rourke did not respond to a fax and voice mail message seeking comment.

Hilarious — if you can’t beat ‘em, send in the clowns. Via the NYT.

Tags: aug, computer, consultant, employee, linuxworld, message, microsoft, school, stuff, trade