Electronic Voting . Bad Idea , now and forever .

~~ I really wish this concept of Electronic Voting would go away,, click here and here and here for earlier rants on this topic. ~` TP

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Diebold Source Code Leaked Again
by Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
Monday, October 23, 2006 06:00 AM PDT

Source code to Diebold Election Systems voting machines has been leaked once again. Last week, former Maryland state legislator Cheryl C. Kagan was anonymously given disks containing source code to Diebold's BallotStation and Global Election Management System (GEMS) tabulation software used in the 2004 elections.

Kagan, a well-known critic of electronic voting, is Executive Director of the Carl M. Freeman Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in Olney, Maryland.

The disks were created and distributed by two federal voting machine testing labs run by Ciber and Wyle Laboratories. They had been testing systems on behalf of the state of Maryland, Diebold said in a statement.

This is not the first time that Diebold source code has been leaked. In early 2003, Diebold critic Bev Harris uncovered similar source code while conducting research using Google's search engine.

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Yahoo! and Google on my phone . Yahoo! wins so far ........

A while back , Google and Yahoo! announced they were venturing into the mobile/wireless world. I billed as "The final war" between them, as the future IS wireless.

At the time , I still had a primitive cellphone , one that only made phonecalls.

Now I got a free upgrade to a new phone ,, and my cell service provider in T-Mobile,, has a great deal for $5.99 a month you can surf the net using a WAP Browser.

Well,,, Yahoo! Wins,, so far. Gmail just refuses to remember me , and I ain't going to enter my username and password everytime I want to go to gmail. Plus yesterday , I figured I would give a shot a composing a Gmail on the phone -- never really a fun thing with any email -- and old Gmail re-asked for my user name and password INSTEAD of sending my email !! All an all,, with Google mobile so far , on my phone at least , Gmail is USELESS.

Yahoo! on the other hand , always remembers me. Also the format is streamed and simple. Function over form.. no colors , just text .

And what is really cool , THERE ARE NO Advertisements-- yet-- at Yahoo. They seem more to just be aiming at customer service and retention.

'Cause now after switching my main Email to Gmail , the wireless world has brough back to my Yahoo! Email account. Big victory here for Yahoo!, as far as this internet user.

While typing an Email on a phone is a bit of a chore , it does work in a pinch, for a brief note. But the real joy is getting to the email inbox at Yahoo! , in am easy & wireless/mobile way , to see if it worth running to to my desktop at home or elsewhere.

Now I just POP all my email accounts --- including Gmail -- over to Yahoo! Email, so I can track my emails quick and easy using my WAP Browser at Yahoo!. SO for now at least for now Yahoo is winning the first round of the Wireless War.

Gmail meanwhile tries to recreate their standard internet webpages in WAP format , and is is a bad mix, again at least on my Nokia free standard cellset from t-mobile.

~~` technopolitical