Circuit Writer Version 5.6

by Jim Scheef

More on the One Laptop Per Child

Those of you who attended the January General Meeting had the opportunity to see, touch and even play with an XO-1 laptop. John Lansdale and I passed our machines around the room. The politics and intrigue aside, several hundred thousand little green laptops are already on their way children in third world countries. I have had little time to really work with it. At our board meeting, John was showing me features he had found or are documented on the Wiki. The actual user documentation is a work in progress using a Wiki (wiki.laptop.org/go/Home) like Wikipedia where actual users can add details.

Net Neutrality

If you don’t think that net neutrality is important or that it could affect you, then read this: The FCC is investigating Comcast for blocking customer access to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent and Gnutella, as well as business applications such as Lotus Notes. Is Comcast your Internet service provider? What ports might they block next? See http://tinyurl.com/2kzoel for the eWeek article. If Comcast had their own music service, would they block iTunes?

Voting Machines Déjà Vu

Remember all my rants about voting machines four years ago and then again two years ago? Well, their baaack! Here in Connecticut we have as high a likelihood of having our votes count as anywhere. After some false starts our voting laws require all towns to use a voting method that provides a voter-verified paper trail and that electronic counting be audited in at least 10% of all precincts. My only concern with this method is that the ballots are stacked neatly in the bin below the scanning machine. The ballots could later be compared to the voter check-in lists to determine how individuals voted. In a busy voting place with multiple check-in lines, this is a small concern. In a very slow precinct, or a town election with low voter turnout, this could be a serious concern. I have yet to hear of a perfect system.

Electronic voting machines were used in the last general election and many of the worst fears were realized. As a result California, Florida and Colorado have decertified all or part of their touch-screen voting machines. You can learn why by reading the article in the New Your Times Magazine section from January 6, 2008, at http://tinyurl.com/yrxjum. The next day, the NY Times carried an op-ed piece about an intriguing system that allows individual voters to audit election results. You can read this at http://tinyurl.com/ytppdm.

Sorry this is so short but I’m in northern Vermont at Craftsbury Ski Center, a really great touring center. This year they installed Wi-Fi to allow shared access to a satellite Internet connection. It’s working well enough for me to file this column! One last note: I’ve started to include tiny URLs in the print version of this column. They are created by a service at (can you guess?) tinyurl.com. The service takes one of those typical long URLs and crunches it into something short enough that you have some hope of typing it correctly. This column will also be available on the CircuitWriter blog where your comments are welcomed.