Posts by Scott Fradkin
BarCampMadison2 will be held on July 26 and 27 at the Extra Bold Portfolio School downtown. Registration will be available very soon [1]. We still need help getting things together, so check out the website and the notes from our last meeting [2]. Attendance for the BarCamp will be limited, so register as early as possible. As always, BarCampMadison2 is open to the public and free, but be prepared to share your knowledge!
[1] – http://barcampmadison2.org
[2] –http://barcamp.org/BarCampMadison2-2008-07-13-Planning-Meeting
Filed in: Team Member Blog barcampmadison2
Electronic Voting rears its ugly head yet again.
From just that one sentence it should be relatively easy to tell where I stand on the issue. Technology does a lot of great things for us, but sometimes technology is completely unnecessary. Electronic voting seems to suffer from the elephant gun syndrome. Although it would be easier to collect and tabulate votes for an election electronically, using paper and pencil is a tried and true mechanism for correctly identifying and counting votes.
I know that I wouldn’t want my vote to be counted by a machine that is built by a company like Diebold.
Bruce Schneier has a blog post [1] that points to another blog entry [2] written by a guy named Dan Wallach who is an associate professor in the Comp. Sci. department at Rice University. His specialty is electronic voting security. He’s been called on numerous times to testify in front of the Texas House Committee on Elections about the topic.
It seems that the various companies that build electronic voting machines are bending over backward (think crazy Matrix bullet time Neo moves) to twist the results of some studies that have been done on the security of these voting machines to convince states that the machines are safe to use. It’s not exactly easy to corrupt or change results on these machines, but it’s not impossible. Downright scary is what I think. Voters that have to use these machines to vote cannot be assured that their votes will be tabulated correctly. Municipalities cannot necessarily detect that the results are corrupt according to Mr. Wallach.
Voting is too important a thing to be left entrusted to companies developing these machines behind closed doors. Mr. Schneier is consistent in saying that security by obscurity just doesn’t work. I’m still not sure I’d want to use any electronic voting machine even if it’s completely open source and been vetted by numerous third parties. Pen and paper any day for me. I won’t mind if it takes a week to figure out who won a particular election as long as I know that all the votes have been counted correctly.
No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, if you work with computers and technology on a daily basis, this should scare you. It’s necessary to get people talking about the issues with their governmental representatives to ensure that everyone’s vote will count.
[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/dan_wallach_on.html
[2]http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1304
Filed in: Team Member Blog security, electronic voting
One of my favorite authors is Cory Doctorow. He writes some great science fiction that is both relevant and contemporary. Cory is somewhat unique in that while he publishes his books in dead tree format through major book publishers, he still gives away the text of his works and podcasts his works in audio form all under a Creative Commons license. A few years back he worked for the EFF and he still lectures and writes about electronic freedoms.
His newest novel was just released at the beginning of the month. It is a young adult novel titled “Little Brother”. It’s a story about a high school hacker who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was accused of being a terrorist. The novel recounts how he fights back against the Department of Homeland Security for taking away freedoms. Cory put up a website for the book [1] that contains news about the book, his tour schedule, links to download the text of the book, and even a place to submit remixes of the book. One of my favorite tie-ins is an RSS feed written by the main character from the book at the website Instructables [2]. It’s a bunch of how-tos for various things from the book like how to screen print t-shirts and how to avoid digital camera noise signatures. Fun stuff.
[1] – Little Brother Website
[2] –w1n5t0n’s Instructables feed
Filed in: Team Member Blog little brother, cory doctorow, instructables, sci-fi
I briefly spoke with a colleague of mine today and he was checking his messages on his new work cellphone. It was one of those new-fangled Blackberry devices. He was telling me about some of the things it can do. In jest, I pulled out my year-and-a-half old flip phone. No camera, no keyboard, I don’t even know how to download a ringtone for it. I just want my phone to be a phone. That’s probably too much to ask as the cellphone industry is going further and further towards creating devices that can do everything. I already have devices that can do the other things: a digital camera and a laptop. I like having the ability to leave things home when I don’t want to be bothered. I just don’t feel the need to be constantly connected.
There was a time when I’d get excited about the newest techno-gadget on the market. Miniaturization and packing in features are keys to getting people excited about products (my cellphone runs my website, has an 8MP camera, and does my laundry… it’s the size of a credit card!). But, nowadays, I’d rather have simplicity. I like my iPod because it plays music really well (though I can’t stand iTunes, fortunately I can use gtkpod) not because it can also bake bread.
I like to extend the thoughts of simplicity to my programming. It’s sometimes cool to come up with the entire kitchen along with the sink in a couple of lines of code, but I’ve found that it’s better to just keep it simple and clean. It usually works out better if the code is easy to understand even if it takes 20 lines to create that kitchen sink.
But then again… sometimes IT IS cool to throw in that kitchen with 2 extra lines of elegant code.
Filed in: Team Member Blog simplicity
I haven’t posted anything for quite awhile, but rest assured that even though I haven’t posted anything I have been busy writing. I’ve been working on a couple of longer articles plus a number of shorter posts. I’m also working on a new presentation which I hope is ready in some form for BarCampMadison2. On the topic of BarCampMadison2, there will be another planning meeting on Saturday, March 29 at 1pm at Escape Coffee House, so if you’re still interested in helping out please show up to the meeting. We’re still working on trying to find a venue to hold the BarCamp. Because of this we do not have an official date to hold the BarCamp. The website is up and functional at http://barcampmadison2.org.
Filed in: Team Member Blog
I recently had a few minutes to write myself a program to convert a directory of FLAC files to MP3 format. Read the article to see how I did it.
Filed in: Team Member Blog ruby, flactomp3
The BarCampMadison2 planning meeting was held yesterday. We had a good crowd of 14 people there. This was split between Madison and Milwaukee residents. We had a great discussion about what we need to do to get the BarCamp together and I think that we all did a great job. The notes from the meeting are available on the main BarCamp website at http://barcamp.org/BarcampMadison2. The main BarCampMadison2 website should be up soon. I’ll post the link when that happens.
The BarCamp has a tentative date of April 19 and 20. We have many things to get done before then and more help is always appreciated. If you’d like to help out, be sure to sign up to the BarCampMadison Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/barcampmadison. Holding with BarCamp philosophy, planning of the BarCamp is an open and community-driven task. Everything will be discussed and will be on the website. If you have suggestions or would like to pitch in and get something done, just let us know.
Filed in: Team Member Blog planning, barcampmadison2, 2008, barcamp
I have put together an article about my experiences at BarCampMilwaukee2. I wrote it because I wanted to be able to point people to something that can describe what a BarCamp is like. It’s one thing to give out the description of “unconference, no preset schedule, etc.”, but it’s another thing to actually be at the BarCamp participating. I really enjoyed BarCampMilwaukee2 as I have previously posted and I’m getting excited about the possibilities ahead of us for BarCampMadison2.
The article can be found at http://tech.fradkin.com/articles/barcampmilwaukee2.html.
I’ve also created a handy RSS feed for tech.fradkin.com that can be pulled into your favorite feed reader: http://tech.fradkin.com/rssfeed.xml. Updates tend to be infrequent, but at least you would be notified that I’ve updated something.
Filed in: Team Member Blog barcampmilwaukee2, article, whatisbarcamp?
