taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Web: Bernie Goldbach points to a site that’s news to me: AnotherFriend.com. It’s an Irish dating site.

I’ve had the odd discussion comparing dating culture in the US (organised ‘dating’) and Ireland and the UK (where it’s a lot more casual), and I must say, I was really convinced that the Friendster/craigslist-style organised, web-mediated dating just wouldn’t fly.

Seems I was wrong! Right now, there’s 157 people online on the site, with a good half of those being logged-in, chatting users, and about 75% of those in turn being premium, paying members. Wow, not bad.

Politics: TheyWorkForYou.com is a triumph. The most incredibly detailed, and web-aware, hypertextual database of political activity I’ve seen yet. The web-awareness — full of scraping, links, RSS and even community — is what makes it amazing; the concept of being able to read news of your representative’s latest speeches and voting record in your RSS aggregator is incredible. We need to get this out there for every country in the world.

It certainly beats Today in Parliament, that’s for sure ;)

Aside: nice choice of username for the ‘Site News’ weblog:

Some sites linking to this entry

An error occurred: Connection error: Access denied for user: ‘fawkesmt’@'localhost’ (Using password: YES)

Wierd: Incredible footage (WMV stream) of a guy who went nuts, converted a caterpillar earthmover into what is essentially a tank, and went on a GTA-style rampage through the streets of Granby, 15 miles west of Denver, Colorado. In the process, he destroys the local bank, the newspaper, and several stores, seemingly working on the basis of (several) personal grudges.

Tags: anotherfriend, com, culture, discussion, error, friendster, lot, news, rss, site, web

eVoting: Are you an academic, or do you know any academics, working in the field of computer science in Ireland? If so, you should consider signing, or collecting signatures, on
this ICTE statement. It’s eminently reasonable — ’since computers are inherently subject to programming and design error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering, we join with (the ACM) in recommending that a voter-verified audit trail be one of the essential requirements for deployment of new voting systems.’ (thx for the pointer, Simon!)

Tags: academic, computer, design, equipment, error, evoting, field, icte, programming, science, statement

E-Voting: Very interesting page reproducing a translation of part of an expert report detailing an incident that occurred during an ‘electronic election’ in Belgium on May 18th 2003.

The latest EDRI-gram notes:

The total number of preferential votes cast on a specific candidate was higher than the total number of votes for his list. A series of tests was conducted on the computer of the president of the voting committee, but the error could not be reproduced. The difference in votes was exactly 4096, leading the research-team to the conclusion that the error was probably due to a spontaneous inversion of a binary position in the read-write memory of the PC.

This serves as a pretty good pointer to how, even if the software is audited to death and pronounced reliable, the hardware can still trip you up. Computers are fundamentally unreliable.

The solution? Why, a Voter-Verifiable Audit Trail of course. ;)

Tags: e-voting, election, error, expert, incident, may, number, page, part, report, translation

IraqBodyCount.net on the JDAM bomb:

The B-2 bomber carries sixteen 2′000 lb. JDAM bombs. If all goes 100% as planned (the bomb does not fall outside of its specified margin of error of 13 meters, and the GPS guidance system is not foiled by a $50 radio jammer kit, easily purchased), then here is what one such bomb does :

• everyone within a 120 meter radius is killed;
• to be safe from serious shrapnel damage, a person must be at least 365
  • meters away;

• to be really safe from all effects of fragmentation, a person must be 1000 meters away, according to Admiral Stufflebeem.

  The B-2s will be used upon targets within Baghdad.

  -Prof Marc W. Herold, IBC Project Consultant

Sounds like the perfect weapon for use in tight city streets. :(

Tags: bomb, bomber, error, gps, guidance, iraqbodycount, jdam, margin, person, sixteen