AEA Brighton 2007

I spent yesterday afternoon at the AEA conference in Brighton, very strange experience as there was a clutch of people waiting for me, ready to shake my hand and be my friend! Turns out I've become something of a darling within eVoting circles, without really trying.

Apparently Jason was there (on Monday, along with two "helpers", Ania and Becky) pretending to be a "student", although he didn't stick around for long... wonder why? I don't think he got anything out of his fishing expedition as there's been nothing posted about the conference (apart from his twisted intepretation of Sir Grahams speech).

GNU.Free availability

I know I've asked this question many times before : "Why if Jason Kitcat is so set against eVoting is the source for GNU.Free still available on his website?".

I've had problems resolving these two, surely if you're set against something you're not going to attempt to provide a mechanism for doing it.

I asked Jason about this (for about the fourth time) on his site and received a response basically saying he'd already answered here. I'm afraid I don't agree, and I'm sure any sane reader would agree, that page advocates eVoting within a certain context (i.e. free and open software), which is a direct contradicition to his and the ORGs stance that all eVoting is a "bad thing". Nowhere on that page does it say that eVoting should never be used, which is his general opinion.

So what's the story? It seems that Mr Kitcat is fighting against all forms of eVoting in an attempt to stop commercial organisations from being involved. Why? So that a free and open implementation can be pushed... guess what's (in his mind) the top candidate? GNU.Free of course! Please bear in mind this is just my thinking on the subject, I've got no concrete evidence to support this, just my conclusions from Jasons arguments.

I wonder how the good people at ORG would feel knowing that they're possibly being used to kill commercial eVoting to promote one persons agenda (and product)?

As I've said these are just my thoughts and are not presented as fact, if anyone else has a different intepretation of what may be going on please comment. I'd love to have a different view on this.

Old Slashdot discussion

From November last year, suprisingly (given all the problems the Americans have had with their suppliers) the tone is quite upbeat. The answers provided by Hugh Thompson indicate his willingness to accept eVoting within the framework of... good auditting and well defined security procedures! Just like I was advocating. We really need to get together.

Linky

Estonian elections

Looks like the Estonians are gearing up for their next online parliamentary election.

Good luck guys.

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?