samadhisoft.com

– How refreshing, in a world of political stupidity, to find a national leader with a hard science background and the political acumen to push science’s POV into the decision making. 

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Angela Merkel, a physical chemist-turned-G8 leader, is putting science on the European and global agenda.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel—theoretical chemist, head of state during Germany’s upcoming EU presidency, and current leader of the G8—recently took a shot at the climate politicking of the United States. “To prevent global warming, the nations with the largest emissions of gases that are causing climate change will have to take part,” she stated. “That’s why we will make this an important issue again on the agenda during our G8 presidency.”

It was a bold move, considering the US delegation’s notorious avoidance of climate commitments during Tony Blair’s G8 leadership two years ago. But Merkel, whose direct diplomatic style has been dubbed “the Merkel method,” is capable of exploiting the potential of complex situations. Her political success has come as a result of both her analytical mind and her remarkable tenacity. Merkel is, in many ways, still a scientist, and Germany—the fifth-largest economy in the world—is her lab.

Merkel was born in 1954 in Hamburg, but she didn’t see much of it: Her father, Horst Kasner, decided that year to take his family to Soviet-held East Germany, where he became a pastor about 50 miles north of Berlin. Merkel attended church, despite the risks; in the communist society, churchgoing could make it almost impossible to gain admission to state-controlled university, get good jobs, or even rent an apartment.

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Eric Schmidt told Republican Governors that the Internet was the key to next Presidential Election, according to an article in Zdnet.

Eric offered a few examples of how the Internet, especially video file-sharing sites like Google’s newly acquired YouTube, had changed the political landscape by enabling anyone to disseminate information widely and instantly.

A couple of examples were given in the Zdnet article that I was not fully aware of. I knew that US. Rep. John Murtha was running for a key position in the Democratic House – and somehow, that he was not popular enough (did not know why) till now:

Democratic U.S. Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania felt the sting when somebody resurrected secretly recorded footage taken during the FBI’s Abscam bribery investigation in the late 1970s. Murtha rejected a bribe offer from undercover agents dressed as Arab sheiks and was never charged during the investigation, but the video showed him telling the purported sheiks that “I want to deal with you guys awhile before I make any transactions.”The footage was posted on YouTube and other Web sites just as Murtha was trying to persuade fellow Democratic representatives to elect him as their majority leader. He lost.

In other words, the skillful use of online video and audio footage can destroy or raise any one’s reputation within a couple of hours – that’s how powerful the Internet is.

In another well-publicized campaign incident, a videotape of Virginia Republican Sen. George Allen calling an opposition campaign worker of Indian descent “macaca” also spread quickly over the Internet. Allen went on to lose to Democrat Jim Webb.

I heard something about Google Earth Maps and the Gulf kingdom of Brhrain last weekend but did not have the details. Turns out that……

……Schmidt said the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain got a taste in the run-up to its elections last weekend, when someone used the Google Earth satellite mapping feature to photograph the ruling family’s lavish houses, and posted them on line, juxtaposed next to the homes of ordinary citizens.The government tried to censor the photos, which instantly boosted their popularity, he said.

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– I like this idea.  I think all of us should have free and unfettered access to information so we can each make up our own minds about things.   I oppose governments which try to control access to information.

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TORONTO, Nov. 21 — Deep in a basement lab at the University of Toronto a team of political scientists, software engineers and computer-hacking activists, or “hactivists,” have created the latest, and some say most advanced tool yet in allowing Internet users to circumvent government censorship of the Web.

The program, called psiphon (pronounced “SY-fon”), will be released on Dec. 1 in response to growing Internet censorship that is pushing citizens in restrictive countries to pursue more elaborate and sophisticated programs to gain access to Western news sites, blogs and other censored material.

“The problem is growing exponentially,” said Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which designed psiphon. “What might have started as censorship of pornography and Western news organizations has expanded to include blogging sites, religious sites, health information sites and many others.”

Psiphon is downloaded by a person in an uncensored country (psiphon.civisec.org), turning that person’s computer into an access point. Someone in a restricted-access country can then log into that computer through an encrypted connection and using it as a proxy, gain access to censored sites. The program’s designers say there is no evidence on the user’s computer of having viewed censored material once they erase their Internet history after each use. The software is part of a broader effort to live up to the initial hopes human rights activists had that the Internet would provide unprecedented freedom of expression for those living in restrictive countries.

“Governments have militarized their censorship efforts to an incredible extent so we’re trying to reverse some of that and restore that promise that the Internet once had for unfettered access and communication,” Dr. Deibert said.

When it opened in 2000, the Citizen Lab, which is one of four institutions in the OpenNet Initiative (opennetinitiative.org), was actively monitoring a handful of countries, mainly China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that censored the Internet. But citing increased filtering by governments, the lab now monitors more than 40 countries.

The program’s designers say existing anticensorship programs are too complicated for everyday computer users, leave evidence on the user’s computer and lack security in part because they have to be advertised publicly, making it easy for censors to detect and block access to them.

“Now you will have potentially thousands, even tens of thousands, of private proxies that are almost impossible for censors to follow one by one,” said Qiang Xiao, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Instead of publicly advertising the required login and password information, psiphon is designed to be shared within trusted social circles of friends, family and co-workers. This feature is meant to keep the program away from censors but is also the largest drawback because it limits efforts to get the program to as many people as possible.

The software is also designed to allow users to post on blogs and other Web sites like Wikipedia, which has been a problem for some other anticensorship programs. By requiring only login information and no installation, psiphon is intended for anyone with basic computer knowledge because psiphon functions much the same as any typical browser.

“So far it’s been tech solutions for tech people,” said Dmitri Vitaliev, a human rights activist in Russia who has been testing psiphon in countries where the Internet is censored. “We have not had very good tools so everyone has been eagerly awaiting psiphon.”

Original article on the NY Times site here… ➡

– It isn’t difficult for experts to define what makes a resonably safe electronic voting system. The Australians did it.

– It is just amazing that in this country we’ve accepted unsafe-voting systems which are just invitations for cheating – and there hasn’t even been an outcry. I’ve done multiple posts on this subject. To see them all, use the search box at the upper right and enter ‘voting‘.

– Many people think that the Republican Party here in the US has the inside-track with the majority of the companys (four, I believe) which manufacturer e-Voting machines. I don’t know if that’s true but it was interesting to read in this article that when Representative Rush Holt, a Democrat, introduced a bill requiring that all code in e-Voting machines be made public, the list of his 50 co-sponsors were all democrats.
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While critics in the United States grow more concerned each day about the insecurity of electronic voting machines, Australians designed a system two years ago that addressed and eased most of those concerns: They chose to make the software running their system completely open to public scrutiny.

Although a private Australian company designed the system, it was based on specifications set by independent election officials, who posted the code on the Internet for all to see and evaluate. What’s more, it was accomplished from concept to product in six months. It went through a trial run in a state election in 2001.

Critics say the development process is a model for how electronic voting machines should be made in the United States.

Called eVACS, or Electronic Voting and Counting System, the system was created by a company called Software Improvements to run on Linux, an open-source operating system available on the Internet.

Election officials in the Australian Capital Territory, one of eight states and territories in the country, turned to electronic voting for the same reason the United States did — a close election in 1998 exposed errors in the state’s hand-counting system. Two candidates were separated by only three or four votes, said Phillip Green, electoral commissioner for the territory. After recounting, officials discovered that out of 80,000 ballots, they had made about 100 mistakes. They decided to investigate other voting methods.

In 1999, the Australian Capital Territory Electoral Commission put out a public call for e-vote proposals to see if an electronic option was viable. Over 15 proposals came in, but only one offered an open-source solution. Two companies proposed the plan in partnership after extensive consultation with academics at Australian National University. But one of the companies later dropped out of the project, leaving Software Improvements to build the system.

Green said that going the open-source route was an obvious choice.

“We’d been watching what had happened in America (in 2000), and we were wary of using proprietary software that no one was allowed to see,” he said. “We were very keen for the whole process to be transparent so that everyone — particularly the political parties and the candidates, but also the world at large — could be satisfied that the software was actually doing what it was meant to be doing.”

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There’s also great general coverage of this important subject at Wired Magazine here: ➡

– I’ve posted a number of articles on this subject here, here, here, here, here, and here.   I’m glad to see that computer scientists are getting involved in a discussion of what constitutes a reasonable electronic voting machine.

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It’s been six years since the Florida presidential fiasco launched a flurry of spending around the country to replace antiquated punch-card and lever voting machines with expensive new electronic touch-screen machines. Yet new controversies over the security of e-voting machines continue to crop up, making it clear that the new machines are just as problematic as the ones they replaced.

Why can’t the voting machine companies get it right?

With election season upon us, Wired News spoke with two of the top computer scientists in the field, UC Berkeley’s David Wagner and Princeton’s Ed Felten, and came up with a wish list of features we would include in a voting machine, if we were asked to create one.

These recommendations can’t guarantee clean results on their own. Voting machines, no matter how secure, are no remedy for poor election procedures and ill-conceived election laws. So our system would include thorough auditing and verification capabilities and require faithful adherence to good election practices, as wells as topnotch usability and security features.

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– Did you know that the United States is the only country in the developed world without a tax supported public healthcare system? That’s an amazing thing but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Most people think that private healthcare delivers better service than public healthcare – but they are wrong. Decades of statistics show that private healthcare leads to poorer public health.

– The Fall 2006 issue of Yes Magazine is dedicated to health issues and it is all well worth reading but the story I’ve linked to, below, is the one that will most likely to make you sit up with amazment.
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Has Canada Got the Cure?
by Holly Dressel

Publicly funded health care has its problems, as any Canadian or Briton knows. But like democracy, it’s the best answer we’ve come up with so far.

Should the United States implement a more inclusive, publicly funded health care system? That’s a big debate throughout the country. But even as it rages, most Americans are unaware that the United States is the only country in the developed world that doesn’t already have a fundamentally public–that is, tax-supported–health care system.

That means that the United States has been the unwitting control subject in a 30-year, worldwide experiment comparing the merits of private versus public health care funding. For the people living in the United States, the results of this experiment with privately funded health care have been grim. The United States now has the most expensive health care system on earth and, despite remarkable technology, the general health of the U.S. population is lower than in most industrialized countries. Worse, Americans’ mortality rates–both general and infant–are shockingly high.

Different paths

Beginning in the 1930s, both the Americans and the Canadians tried to alleviate health care gaps by increasing use of employment-based insurance plans. Both countries encouraged nonprofit private insurance plans like Blue Cross, as well as for-profit insurance plans. The difference between the United States and Canada is that Americans are still doing this, ignoring decades of international statistics that show that this type of funding inevitably leads to poorer public health.

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