Hi,
Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind there are cogs rotating and now and again I have ideas. Today seems to be one of those days.
It struck me that there are several things that we could do within Ireland.
There are several machines not being used by the government, these are mostly the evoting machines. If anyone can publish pros and cons for each of these we might manage to get together a few salient thoughts and make proposals to the people who hold in their hands the ability to make things happen.
It occurs to me that the evoting machines were a and continue to be a waste of resources. This should be rectified. They could be used for public good, or reassigned roles where they could run free software, the task may not be as hard as it seems.
The politics and work of getting them out of cold storage, stripped down, and ready for action is something that we need to consider in considering and of the suggestions below.
So the ideas are as follows:
1) Provide them to the UN as part of our annual contribution, the calculation is not of interest to me now however this would be a proposed use, there is a need when disasters strike worldwide to provide databases of information in a fashion that those who wish to contribute to aid relief need to be able to coordinate their data. The core of the suggestion is that there be an international database with suitable locale font features enabled. It would provide a large scale clustered "web interface" to assist manage any disaster. A wiki or blog with some serious modifications, to track and identify people places and materials damaged by such a disaster, none the less a large scale database running free software.
2) Attach them to the national grid of computing resources for scientific research.
3) Run distributed number crunching for "approved" charitable projects.
4) Maintain the status quo
5) Anyone with alternative ideas.
There you go just to get the ball rolling.The only condition of the proposal from perspective should only run free software.
IFSO's role would be to provide assistance to assist any such a proposal into life.
Regards,
Paul O'Malley
On 28/05/06, Paul O'Malley ompaul@eircom.net wrote:
- Anyone with alternative ideas.
Send them to schools in Africa!
That's what I'm going to be doing over the summer with a new Irish charity Camara (http://www.camara.ie), if you want to help us out we have a paypal account. We're going over on June 19th, so we've sent over the computers on the boat, but next time Camara is sending a batch over and needs machines I'll put the word out. It's either that or pay the €20 recycling charge.
Rory McCann
Hi,
On 28.05.06 17:21, Paul O'Malley wrote:
It occurs to me that the evoting machines were a and continue to be a waste of resources. This should be rectified. They could be used for public good, or reassigned roles where they could run free software, the task may not be as hard as it seems.
I think the voting stations themselves are fairly low-end machines with a Motorola 68000-series processor, so roughly comparable to an original Palm Pilot.
There are a some so-called "hardened" PCs for doing the counting. One per constituency, I suppose. These would be more powerful and there must be around a hundred of these. In theory, these would be installed in some standard configuration with a reliable supply of spare parts, and maintained for some well-defined period into the future, but I suspect that they might get chucked out or replaced with other PCs or repurposed in local county council offices...
...
- Attach them to the national grid of computing resources for
scientific research.
<plug> http://grid.ie/ </plug> :)
David
I think the voting stations themselves are fairly low-end machines with a Motorola 68000-series processor, so roughly comparable to an original Palm Pilot.
I was taught assembly on 68000 machines (they were called Waterloo stations, not sure why) which I quite enjoyed.
Perhaps a university or tech could make use of them. Perhaps a course in embedded computing could design better e-voting firmware (although I seem to remember that it isn't just a case of better firmware).
Malx.
___________________________________________________________ All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of Vi@gr@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html
Hey Malcolm et al,
On 29 May, 2006, at 11:45, Malcolm Tyrrell wrote:
I think the voting stations themselves are fairly low-end machines with a Motorola 68000-series processor, so roughly comparable to an original Palm Pilot.
I was taught assembly on 68000 machines (they were called Waterloo stations, not sure why) which I quite enjoyed.
I always enjoyed 680X0 assembly coding as well. I was buried in it for years in my Amiga days...
Perhaps a university or tech could make use of them. Perhaps a course in embedded computing could design better e-voting firmware (although I seem to remember that it isn't just a case of better firmware).
Actually, as I mentioned in my previous email, the firmware is not the problem at all. The voting machines, firmware, etc. have all been very carefully evaluated by very respectable organizations (e.g., TNO). They are not FLOSS, of course, but they are small, well- documented, well-reviewed, etc. The problem is the vote setup and counting application developed by PowerVote.
Joe --- Joseph Kiniry School of Computer Science and Informatics UCD Dublin http://secure.ucd.ie/ http://srg.cs.ucd.ie/
On 29 May, 2006, at 11:30, David O'Callaghan wrote:
Hi,
On 28.05.06 17:21, Paul O'Malley wrote:
It occurs to me that the evoting machines were a and continue to be a waste of resources. This should be rectified. They could be used for public good, or reassigned roles where they could run free software, the task may not be as hard as it seems.
I think the voting stations themselves are fairly low-end machines with a Motorola 68000-series processor, so roughly comparable to an original Palm Pilot.
This is correct. They are actually pretty nifty pieces of hardware. Very simple, custom embedded OS, very little layering and complexity, etc.
There are a some so-called "hardened" PCs for doing the counting. One per constituency, I suppose. These would be more powerful and there must be around a hundred of these. In theory, these would be installed in some standard configuration with a reliable supply of spare parts, and maintained for some well-defined period into the future, but I suspect that they might get chucked out or replaced with other PCs or repurposed in local county council offices...
Actually, from what I recall of my brief direct and lengthy indirect involvement in electronic voting in Ireland (having been invited to two panels then "uninvited" when they find out what level of access is necessary to perform the security and correctness reviews that they were asking me to do), I do not recall any hardening guidelines for the vote setup and tally machines. They were just PCs with a minimal config. The big problem here is not so much the PC, but the fact that the associated software is tens of thousands of lines of semi-undocumented Delphi code....
...
- Attach them to the national grid of computing resources for
scientific research.
<plug> http://grid.ie/ </plug> :)
Joe --- Joseph Kiniry School of Computer Science and Informatics UCD Dublin http://secure.ucd.ie/ http://srg.cs.ucd.ie/
Hi Paul et al,
On 28 May, 2006, at 17:21, Paul O'Malley wrote:
Hi,
Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind there are cogs rotating and now and again I have ideas. Today seems to be one of those days.
It struck me that there are several things that we could do within Ireland.
There are several machines not being used by the government, these are mostly the evoting machines. If anyone can publish pros and cons for each of these we might manage to get together a few salient thoughts and make proposals to the people who hold in their hands the ability to make things happen.
It occurs to me that the evoting machines were a and continue to be a waste of resources. This should be rectified. They could be used for public good, or reassigned roles where they could run free software, the task may not be as hard as it seems.
The politics and work of getting them out of cold storage, stripped down, and ready for action is something that we need to consider in considering and of the suggestions below.
So the ideas are as follows:
- Provide them to the UN as part of our annual contribution, the
calculation is not of interest to me now however this would be a proposed use, there is a need when disasters strike worldwide to provide databases of information in a fashion that those who wish to contribute to aid relief need to be able to coordinate their data. The core of the suggestion is that there be an international database with suitable locale font features enabled. It would provide a large scale clustered "web interface" to assist manage any disaster. A wiki or blog with some serious modifications, to track and identify people places and materials damaged by such a disaster, none the less a large scale database running free software.
- Attach them to the national grid of computing resources for
scientific research.
- Run distributed number crunching for "approved" charitable
projects.
Maintain the status quo
Anyone with alternative ideas.
There you go just to get the ball rolling.The only condition of the proposal from perspective should only run free software.
IFSO's role would be to provide assistance to assist any such a proposal into life.
Regards,
Paul O'Malley
If you want to get behind something like this, then lets get behind the world on FLOSS electronic and internet voting going on here at UCD.
Our work is all based upon the KOA system from NL that I have worked on for a few years, it is all GPL, we are working on a new all-FLOSS release this Summer, we have applied formal methods to various critical parts of the system, and we are now working on an e-voting midlet for mobiles.
In the longer term I could even see integrating the KOA work with the Nedap machines, effectively replacing the SPOS (Steaming Pile of Sh*t) that is the PowerVote software.
Alan Morkan, CCed, is leading this work and can provide more information.
Best, Joe --- Joseph Kiniry School of Computer Science and Informatics UCD Dublin http://secure.ucd.ie/ http://srg.cs.ucd.ie/