Entries Tagged 'Liberating technology' ↓

by Rhona Mahony. Many women in developing countries tell surveyors that they want to have no more children or that they would like to space the births of their future children. Yet, in some countries, over half of those women have never used modern contraception. Private clinics, pharmacies, and public clinics in many developing countries now sell birth control cheaply. Why aren’t women taking advantage of it? A cleverly designed experiment in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, has found one reason. Husbands want more children than their wives do. When wives in Lusaka had a chance to get contraceptives that their husbands didn’t know about, 23 percent more went to the public clinic’s family planning nurse and 38 percent more chose a form of birth control that could be hidden from their husbands, such as an injectable contraceptive. The result: those women had 57 percent fewer unwanted births.
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by Rhona Mahony. Google revealed last week that network intruders have read email messages in the Google accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Someone–still unknown–is determined to spy on Chinese dissidents. Other someones are determined to identify undercover police officers, ferret out employees who secretly inform the police about their company’s crimes, and stalk their own wives who have left home to escape battering. Hundreds of volunteers are now running an Internet service for people who need to protect their privacy. The service is called Tor, the Onion Router. Anyone can provide Tor, for free. Anyone can use Tor to protect his privacy, for free.

Bill McGonigle, of Lebanon, New Hampshire, decided to become a Tor volunteer when he learned that people in Iran were protesting the results of their June Presidential election. They were using the Internet to organize their meetings. The Iranian government was trying to censor their messages to one another. “I have a soft-spot for people trying to gain liberty for themselves,” he wrote in an email, “especially against tyrannical regimes. It became known that they were using Tor to get around the censorship, so at that point I put up a relay….The people I’d like to help are those living under violence-based oppression, most commonly orchestrated by dangerous and corrupt individuals posing as legitimate governments. I’d like to see an end to oppression wherever it exists.”

Get Tor

To become a volunteer, download this software.
To use Tor to protect your own privacy, download this software Continue reading →

Shai Agassi plans to sell purely electric cars to people unwilling to pay one red cent extra for anything green. His company, Better Place (BP), will be fully set up in Israel by 2011, he says, in Denmark about six months after that, and in Australia about a year after Denmark. San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsome, who has just bought a Tesla Roadster, hopes to bring Better Place cars to his city. The cars, though, need a dense network of special battery-swap and charging stations to work. San Franciscans might not want a car that can’t be driven far from home. Once a driver has passed the last electron-filling station, she can only drive 50 miles (80 km) before turning back for a refill.

Required to be Better

The Better Place car looks sensible on an island, where drivers will feel constrained by geography, not their batteries. The island must have high taxes on internal-combustion cars, a supplier of electricity willing to communicate often with the electron filling machines or their masters, and drivers who will accept a bossy electronic nanny in their car. More such islands exist in the world than one might first guess.

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by Rhona Mahony. Small, inexpensive laptop computers from Asus, Acer, HP, Dell, and other companies have been selling well. Many people have found that the low price and portability of these Lilliputian machines outweigh the inconvenience of squinting at a seven-inch (18-cm) display and relearning to type on a child-sized keyboard. At least one famous tall person, Stephen Fry, whose hands are presumably large if not Brobdingnagian, has publicly announced his delight with his Asus EEE PC. Those of us with weak eyes and stubbornly unretrainable fingers, however, have been left out of the fun. Why don’t companies offer a tiny, $300, 20-watt, stand-alone computer into which one can plug a comfortable keyboard and the actually legible display of one’s choice? Such computers do exist. Like their tiny laptop cousins, they require honest assessment of one’s computing needs. In return, they offer several unexpected advantages over a conventional desktop PC.
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by Rhona Mahony. In three weeks, Americans will elect a new President, They’ll also elect new Senators, Congressional representatives, and many state and local officials. Voters in six U.S. states, though, will vote on “direct-recording” electronic (DRE) machines that produce no paper print-out that can be used to double check the accuracy of the machine. Voters in 29 other states may get a paper print-out but, like those in the paperless states, will have no way of knowing how error-prone or easy to manipulate their DRE voting machine is. (See VerifiedVoting.org.) Independent tests of voting machines–done outside the closed labs of the manufacturers–have not been encouraging. Last year, Debra Bowen, California’s Secretary of State, asked computer scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, to help her staff do a “Top-to-Bottom Review” of many of the voting machines that we have been using in California. The result? Ms. Bowen’s team found that machines from Diebold (now Premier Election), Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia were so inaccurate or so insecure or both, that they have “decertified” the machines. If you don’t live in California, you may find yourself looking at one of those duds on November 4.

Better Security with Transparent Software

Should we throw our votes into a black hole? Should we let vote-stealers snicker at us? There may be a better way.

Computer engineer Alan Dechert and his colleagues are offering a system that they call “Open Voting.” It prints out a paper ballot that the voter can read over herself. The ballot has a bar code Continue reading →

by Rhona Mahony. See the EV Finder. It lists cars, trucks, motorcycles, and three-wheelers. They include new vehicles, used vehicles, and hobbyists’ conversions. There are many more electric vehicles on sale today than most people know.

See Plug In America for lots of general information and recent news about electric vehicles.

by Rhona Mahony. This Saturday, September 6, the Silicon Valley chapter of the Electric Auto Association (EAA) showed off scores of innovative, all-electric vehicles in Palo Alto, California. Companies brought their electric cars, trucks, motorcycles, mopeds, and electrically-assisted bicycles. We could also take turns driving them around a test track in the Palo Alto High School parking lot. The biggest thrill was how sleek and colorful the cars were. The designers have a terrific sense of form and color. The second thrill was that these vehicles really were silent. It was eerie. It was a joy to see them rolling and to not hear them. The lesson that I learned was that there are many, many more electric vehicles on sale now than I have been hearing about. A little digging will reveal lots of options. A good place to start: the EAA’s Web site and its monthly newsletter.
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