Another socialist blog

There are serious security problems with Diebold voting machines, both theoretical and confirmed by observation in the field. Here is another first-hand report, this time detailing the performance of Diebold voting machines in the San Diego primary. Two of the six voting machines at the writer’s precinct failed and had to be closed.

[O]ur Inspector called the troubleshooter hotline. There were supposedly one hundred Diebold employees and some county troubleshooters covering about 1,200 precincts, which seems generous to me, but they didn’t dispatch anyone. Our problems were apparently minor compared to those at many of the other precincts….

We had another technical problem later in the day, when a voter reported that his summary screen (the last step before casting the ballot) was blank. I confirmed that it was; everything else seemed normal, and the boxes were checked next to each candidate on the ballot, but there wasn’t anything on the screen where the votes should have been listed. I moved the voter to another station, chalking it up to a card programming error, and kept checking on that station. Another voter had the same problem shortly afterwards, and I closed the station. It appeared to have recorded all of the votes properly, but I can’t be 100% certain. If it hadn’t recorded some data, there wouldn’t have been anything that we could do. Again, the troubleshooter hotline didn’t send anyone out….

NPR has an interesting interview with Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector whose work was cut short by the rush to war in Iraq. Asked to comment on reports that the British bugged UN offices, perhaps including his own, Blix remarked “I wish they had listened more attentively to what we were saying.”

The opposition Socialist Party has declared victory in Spanish elections, defeating the incumbent Popular Party. This is a rebuke to one of the few governments who allied themselves with the Bush administration’s illegal, immoral, imperialist, and unnecessary war against Iraq. It is widely believed that Spain’s alliance with the U.S. has made Spaniards the targets of Islamic terrorism, and that the Madrid bomb attacks that killed 200 people are the first in a series of such attacks.

The Spanish government should not be surprised, since a majority of Spaniards were loudly opposed to the war, and were ignored. Sic semper tyrannis. Let’s hope Tony Blair and George W. Bush follow their allies into the dustbin of history.

I’ve touched many times on the issue of spamming for political gain. Now here’s some further proof that the Republican Party is just as low-down as those people sending me Viagra spam: this spam email from the Republican National Committee arrived today.

This came in “over the transom” and is passed on in its entirety.

Internet Commons Congress 2004

March 24-25, 2004, Outside Washington, DC
Scheduled Sessions/Participants: http://www.internationalunity.org/schedule.html

http://www.internationalunity.org
http://www.nyfairuse.org/icc

Please forward this call to any other concerned parties you might know. Please visit the above links to register to attend and join in the fight to preserve the Internet commons.

Today our commons is under attack.

The attack is wide and pervasive. Even our right to own and use computers inside our homes and offices, is under attack.

The time has come to assemble and declare our rights. We call upon advocates and organizers, authors and cow-orkers, readers and singers, politicians and students, grandmothers and children of all ages, and all who support the right of free human beings to the free dissemination and use of information rendered to the commons for the benefit of the public, to join us at the Internet Commons Congress outside Washington DC on March 24 and 25, 2004.

We live in a time of vibrant prospects and shameful travesties, brought on as we confront the implications of a new and broader and greater empowerment in furtherance of our common wealth and in engagement in our common governance.

Today we possess:

• The Internet: the means to disseminate and make use of published information flexibly and powerfully, on a worldwide scale
• Computers: tools to process, select, combine, analyze and synthesize information at the digital and logical level, and
• Logical Freedom: the power to devise means of applying these tools through the free use and expression of logic in code

But today we also confront:

• attempts to create irrational and wildly artificial legal and regulatory trammels on new conventions, such as VoIP, in order to keep control of the world’s communication channels in the hands of old oligopolies, monopolies, and tyrannical governments
• an intransigent U.S. Federal Communications Commission, arrogating to itself an unprecedented authority to declare exclusive rights policy and to regulate the design of digital devices on that basis
• consolidated mass media and entrenched communications monopolies that subvert principles of the public interest with the willing concurrence of complaisant regulators and legislators
• elected representatives who have made plain their intention to enact a new exclusive right to factual information in databases
• forceful attempts in Europe to subvert the law banning patents on software, by patent establishment professionals and the large companies they serve
• specious arguments by public servants and privileged contractors for the supposed reliability of “new voting technology”
• attempts by the Bio-Medical Cartel and others to seize the fruits of logical, biological, medical, and pharmaceutical researches carried out at publically financed institutions of science and learning
• an already well advanced and well funded plan to impose a redesign of home computer hardware so that running software that you choose would be made impractical, and analyzing and processing information in the manner you choose would be made impossible; the new design, backed by laws such as the DMCA, would result in the emplacement of wiretap and remote control hardware and supporting software in every new low cost home computer sold in 2006
• massive ongoing and systematic violations of contract law and antitrust law and consumer protection law by Microsoft and its partners, by means of which most home users are left with no choice but to run Microsoft operating systems: most people are not offered any choice of operating system at point of sale of the hardware, and are therefore induced to employ systems that are difficult to use and easily parasitized, systems that are indeed so bad because Microsoft need not compete
• a hundred million dollar campaign of barratry and red-baiting conducted by SCO, acting as agent for the convicted monopolist Microsoft, to induce businesses and individuals to steer away from exercising free control of their logic devices, away in particular from GNU/Linux operating systems; the assault led by SCO is only one of many of similar scale

All these issues and more are part of a broad struggle by all the people, we who treasure our freedom and who wish to remain free to use our Net and our computers in all the ways that are both fit and just.

We call all ready advocates and concerned constituencies to assemble at the Internet Commons Congress this March 24 and 25, 2004. Here we will forge a bond in our common cause of information freedom, detail our missions and callings and summon each other to join in common cause.

Please click here for details regarding venue, schedule, logistics: http://www.nyfairuse.org/icc/
Registration for attendance is free: http://www.nyfairuse.org/icc/reg.xhtml

Those in attendance will issue calls for action, as shall we. We call all free citizens to join the struggle against englobulation of our Commons and our computers by the loose association and alliance of cartels, oligopolies, monopolies, and parts of governments, that seek to keep or take control of all the communications systems of the world.

At the moment New Yorkers for Fair Use knows of a few efforts which we will forward at the Congress:

• Continued Actions for Refunds: We hope to prepare materials to move the FTC, Congress of the USA folk, the Federal antitrust team, and the judge in the Microsoft case to consider effective action on the basis of gross violations of both the 1994/1995 consent decree, and the recent conviction of Microsoft. This effort needs several score affidavits dealing with anti-competitive practices at point of sale of low cost computer hardware.
• Education of Regulators and Legislators and Attorneys about Home Computer Hardware: We will explain and demonstrate the boot process today on untrammeled hardware and what the boot process would be like on Palladiated hardware, that is, hardware with hard DRM.
• Procurement Policy Education and Action: We seek to collect and analyze the grossly inequitable policies and procedures by which vendors of source secret softwares keep their special privileged position in the machine rooms and desktops of government agencies.
• Education of Regulators and Legislators and Judges about the Net: We will explain the fundamental principles which, for more than thirty years, have supported the psychic and moral and legal and engineering foundations of our Net. A popularly reported on issue directly connected with these principles is the “issue of Voice Over Internet Protocol”.

These four actions have been mentioned because organizations, tribes, and individuals from New York City have recently been working on these four efforts. We know that other efforts will also be carried forward at the Internet Commons Congress. Come and help!

—

New Yorkers for Fair Use
http://www.nyfairuse.org

[CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc

I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of exclusive rights.

You may have been following the efforts of SCO, a corporation that is trying to collect license fees from the users of the free Linux operating system. SCO claims Linux users are in violation of SCO patents, and have been spending millions in legal fees to extort from Linux users. Where ever did SCO get the money? Not, certainly, from producing quality products. Turns out the money has been funneled through third parties by Microsoft. An article today on Slashdot reports on a leaked memo from a SCO whistleblower that proves Microsoft has raised $86 million for SCO’s efforts to destroy Linux, the main threat to Microsoft’s monopoly.

Only the dollar figure, much larger than previously rumored, is a surprise. Capitalists love to talk about the curative powers of a free marketplace. When it doesn’t give them what they want, though, they go straight to the government with their hand out. What the so-called free market won’t deliver, they can get in court or in the legislature.

Are you running Windows? Isn’t it about time you switched to Linux and told Microsoft to go to hell?

In a breathtaking display of hypocrisy even by the brazen standards of American politics, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher has called on Haitian rebels to lay down their arms.

“There is an orderly and constitutional political process under way in Haiti,” Boucher said, apparently hoping we will not notice that an armed coup against an elected leader is at odds with constitutional process.

It’s all very well to say you like democracy. It’s another thing to allow democracy to flourish when you don’t happen to like what the majority has chosen. The United States has a long history of toppling democratically elected governments, including in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1953), Guyana (1964), Brazil (1964), Dominican Republic (1966), Chile (1973), and Grenada (1984).

Now Haiti is added to that long and shameful list. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has been forced out of office at gunpoint by U.S. Marines, who took him to the Central African Republic. (This is strenuously denied by the Bush administration, but they’ve told enough whoppers lately that it seems safe to dismiss their self-serving denials out of hand.) Aristide was doomed because he dared to be independent of the United States.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s statement notes

President Aristide listed in the final chapter of his autobiography, “The Ten Commandments of Democracy in Haiti,” first spoken by him before the General Assembly of the United Nations in September 1991. The commandments of President Aristide, the political faith of a priest, scholar and person of, by and for the poor, included: liberty; democracy; fidelity to human rights; the right to eat and to work; defense of the Haitian diaspora; no to violence; fidelity to the human being — and the highest form of wealth — fidelity to Haitian culture; everyone around the same table.

This is the man President Bush has deposed.

Slashdot reports today that Microsoft’s Tokyo office has been raided by Japan’s Fair Trade Commission, which is investigating whether Microsoft violated the country’s anti-monopoly law. A commission official commented that Microsoft Japan is suspected of “attaching improper restrictive conditions” when signing software deals with Japanese PC makers, such as requiring that Japanese companies allow infringement of their patents.

Apparently their mild punishment for violating U.S. anti-trust law has left no lasting scars. Perhaps the Japanese government will be less forgiving.

I’ve mentioned spam on this blog several times, noting that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris in particular have been caught spamming.

Democrats are no less enthusiastic spammers, though, and now Wes Clark has joined the ranks of spammers, having hired Kintera, Inc. to broadcast his campaign messages unsolicited to voters at the recipients’ expense.