Showing posts with label clue stick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clue stick. Show all posts

Monday, 16 April 2007

It doesn't matter how many times you repeat it...

... it still doesn't make it true, and Becky Hogge of all people should know this isn't true:

"in an election, your identity cannot be associated with your vote without your privacy being breached"

From a New Statesman article. Go disinformation!

Edit : I see what she's done there. Only mention the link of ballot to voter in the context of eVoting as a way of rubbishing electronic voting... nice work Becky! I would have thought that ORG were all about being open and completely truthful, seems they're not adverse to spinning to get their way.

Thursday, 15 February 2007

Blogging about logging

It's been a while since I've nearly snarfed (the top definition, not the one about sniffing bike seats), but just came close. There's was a well balanced report on Click On last night on the BBC I was listening to again (about the Estonian experience), when I remembered that Mr Kitcat had commented on this at some point in the past. A quick search of his site turned up this article which contains the near-snarf-inducing passage:

"(I'm still pretty proud of GNU.FREE's logging and there may be better logging designs cloaked in corporate secrecy)"

For those that haven't been following the story check this article from my blog and this comment from AmmoQ on TDWTF.

The only thing that stopped it being a true snarf incident is the fact that Jason honestly believed this... scary huh?

Monday, 11 December 2006

Clue stick - definition

A semi-official definition of clue stick, a.k.a. the clue-by-four, can be found here (includes some citations).

Sunday, 10 December 2006

Scratch that...

Looks like JK didn't do the fixing I thought he did... which makes the whole thing even funnier. Kinda smacks of the attitudes of certain US voting equipment manufacturers huh?

Monday, 27 November 2006

Warning - Sunspots may bring down democracy

Quick last post for the night. Check out this great vid of Mr Kitcat, the best bit is at the end :

"Powercuts, sunspots" - Yes because it's beyond the wit of man to provide backup power at a hosting center. Or to provide a DR site that duplicates the systems in use at the main site isn't it? I visited hosting centres over the past couple of weeks that have multiple diesel generators that can power the hosting center for three days with just the fuel onsite. And the centers are a priority for delivery of fuel in the event of a fuel crisis. As to the sunspots bit, I'm not even to going to gratify that with an answer. I mean really, sunspots?

"Open to manipulation by the election officials"
- WOW! So a paper ballot isn't? And given what has been said about the technical ability of election officials by the anti-eVote brigade I'd thought they'd be lucky if they could identify a server, let alone find theirs in a SECURE HOSTING FACILITY, then gain privileged access to encrypted databases... yes it's the mild mannered election officials that are the biggest threat to democracy in this country.

"By people that have access to them surreptitiously" - Again, very little chance of this in a SECURE HOSTING FACILITY.

Sorry for the shouting, but I really think Mr Kitcat has no idea how these pilots are run. But that's hardly surprising, the man's never done any serious systems work himself and that seems to be the pattern. These people get the idea into their heads that they are the be all and end all of knowledge in computing and try and dictate to the majority as to how we use technology.

Well good luck Mr Kitcat, because neither the Government, the public nor Local Authorities are listening (and don't think you swung the decision in B&H not to run an eVoting pilot Jason, that was all just politics anyway, the subject for another post).

Tuesday, 21 November 2006

Robot abuse

Time for a quick clue stick beating:

Don't list sensitive files / folders in your robots.txt file

More info can be found in The Web Robots FAQ.

Also make sure you've turned directory browsing off and protected anything sensitive with even basic access controls, the Internet's a wild place. Very basic stuff really.