Wild Bee » Liberating technology

Poor women want contraceptives they can hide

Rhona — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:42:55 +0000

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.

Family planning staff members in many countries have been experimenting with programs to reduce the number of unwanted births. Some are including husbands with their wives in meetings to explain contraceptive methods. The Lusaka experiment suggests that as long as husbands want more children than their wives do, and can get their way, increasing the participation of husbands–and therefore their knowledge of their wives’ birth control plans–may backfire.

Three economists from Harvard University–Nava Ashraf, Erica Field, and a graduate student, Jean Lee–designed and ran the experiment in Lusaka, with funding from the National Science Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Field workers identified 836 married women in the Chipata district of Lusaka willing to participate. The economists randomly assigned the women to an individual group or a couples group. Field workers gave a colorful voucher to each wife entitling her to free contraception at the Chipata government health clinic with a guaranteed waiting time of one hour or less. In the couples group, field workers handed the voucher to the women in the presence of their husbands. In the individual group, they gave the voucher to the women without revealing the offer to the husband. It was up to the wives in the individual group whether or not to let their husbands know about it.

The voucher was valuable. The experiment’s funding made it possible to stock the Chipata Clinic with plenty of injectable Depo-Provera (by Pfizer, Inc.) or implantable Jadelle (manufactured by Bayer Schering Pharma Oy), both eminently hideable inside its user living in a tiny, meagerly furnished house, and both normally out of stock at the clinic. The funding also paid for a nurse dedicated to participating women, so that their waiting time could be kept unusually short. Women who got a secret voucher made their aspirations clear; they queued up to reduce their births and deceive their husbands.

Why might husbands want large families? Economists suspect that husbands don’t take into account how much time and effort child raising requires, since it is their wives’ time and effort, not their own. Most likely, also, few husbands understand that spacing births several years apart results in healthier wives and brighter children. Ashraf, Field, and Alessandra Voena, a Stanford University economics graduate student, are now experimenting in Lusaka with ways to change men’s notions of the ideal number of children. They must also work to update the religious scruples of pharmacists and nurses who refuse to provide contraceptives to women who lack their husbands’ permission, or husbands entirely, for fear of encouraging fornication, infidelity, or battering. According to Field, such paternalism is widespread in Africa.

In Brazil and India, social scientists have found that television soap operas featuring stylish and small middle-class families made millions of poor couples want fewer children. Could the soap operas be dubbed? Or refilmed round the world for new viewers?

“Household Bargaining and Excess Fertility: An Experimental Study in Zambia,” Nava Ashraf, Erica Field, and Jean Lee; November 10, 2009 (unpublished)
Society for Family Health, Lusaka, Zambia

Volunteer Your Computer for Global Privacy

Rhona — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:27:12 +0000

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

How It Works

How Tor works is complicated. It uses fancy cryptography, which is difficult mathematics. It uses technical features of the Internet, which is difficult network engineering. The good news is that neither Tor volunteers nor Tor users need to know any of the hard stuff. Curious readers may enjoy technical explanations by the Tor Project programmers and classroom slides, written by Dan Boneh, a computer science professor at Stanford University specializing in cryptography. The inventors of the original Onion Router have published many papers, as has the team now working on Tor.

To get started, a volunteer–for example, Bill McGonigle in New Hampshire–downloads a software program from the Tor Project, based in Massachusetts, that lets him share a small fraction of his broadband Internet connection with people who use Tor. He chooses how much bandwidth he will set aside for Tor users. It can be as little as 20 kilobytes per second, a small fraction of a 1.5 megabyte connection. The person who wants privacy, let’s say Abigail, downloads a small program that adds a Tor button to her Firefox Web browser. When Abigail clicks on her Tor button, Tor encrypts the message that Firefox sends out, passes that message along three or more randomly-chosen volunteers’ computers, which may include Bill’s, and then connects her to the Web site she wants. Tor then encrypts and bounces the messages along the same path from the destination Web site back to Abigail. Each computer on the path know only which computer preceded it and to which computer it must relay the message. After a short time, Abigail’s Tor chooses a new, random path among volunteers’ computers for her messages to follow. The result: Abigail is using the Web anonymously. Companies, government agencies, and spies have a very hard time figuring out where Abigail is, what site she is visiting, what she is writing or learning, and, if they are monitoring the destination Web site, who is visiting it. Right now, volunteers worldwide are offering Tor on 1755 computers.

China Plays Cat, Tor Plays Mouse, or Is It the Other Way Around?

Zhan Bin, who teaches at the Business School of the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, has written forcefully in his blog in favor of more openness and freedom in China.

In a recent email, he said that he uses Tor every day to read Internet sites, because the Chinese government has blocked so many. If Tor became unavailable to him, he would immediately search for a substitute. At the moment, though, there is no substitute that is as secure or useful as Tor. Tor encrypts people’s messages, unlike most other proxy services. It then passes the messages through a far-flung network of computers not controlled by any single group. It also works with different kinds of Internet communication, such as instant messaging. Because the program is open source, any programmer can build it into his software.

On September 25, 2009, the Chinese government did its best to blockade Tor, possibly in preparation for China’s National Day on October 1. The Tor Project had, from its beginning in 2006, published a list of volunteers’ computers’ IP addresses on several Web sites. The government employees who run China’s Internet gateway simply looked up the Web site and added those publicly-listed Tor IP addresses to the long list of IP addresses whose messages could not enter China. Two days later, 80 percent of those relays were still blocked. The number of Tor relays inside China that could contact the outside world had fallen from over 60–before the blockade–to zero.

By January 5, 2010, though, Zhan Bin and many other Chinese were once again able to use Tor. The number of connections from China had recovered to roughly 40,000 per hour, about half the pre-blockade number. What happened? As Andrew Lewman, the Executive Director of the Tor Project, explained in a telephone call, he and his colleagues had long anticipated and prepared for China’s blockade. Many volunteers had set up secret relays, which were not listed on the public Web sites. Those secret relays are called bridges. On September 25, Lewman and his colleagues faced a challenge right out of a spy novel. How could they communicate the bridges’ secret IP addresses to people far away–and unknown to them–without the Chinese government intercepting the list? The solution: a widely distributed dribble. The Tor Project is releasing the list of bridges, a few at a time. They are using many methods: word of mouth, email, Twitter, other new social media, and Web sites. They reveal no more than one-eighth of the list by any one method. The Chinese government will intercept, and then block, some of the IP address, but not all.

This pouncing and parrying is a game of cat and mouse. Right now, though, Andrew Lewman, Karen Reilly, and the other staff members at Tor do not feel like mice. They say that they are confident that they can continue to move people’s words and photos in and out of China. What they need, they say, is more volunteers to run bridges.

Does the Chinese government feel like the mouse in this game? Half of the Tor Project’s $514,000 annual funding comes from the U.S. government, through the International Broadcasting Bureau, an independent agency that runs radio transmissions for the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia. Ken Berman, the IBB’s head of engineering, sought out Tor, according to Lewman, because he wanted to support new Internet software that circumvented censorship.

Paul Syverson, co-inventor of the original Onion Router, worked and still works in the cryptographic laboratory of the U.S. Navy. In other words, he makes codes for the U.S. Defense Department. As in a delicious paradox common to logic puzzles, after inventing the Onion Router, Syverson told his Navy bosses that the Onion Router could keep the Navy’s secrets secret only if the Navy gave away the Onion Router. Why? Only when people sending messages through the Onion Router network are indistiguishable from average Internet users, can hostile observers not tell which messages to capture and inspect. The more numerous, varied, and ordinary Onion Router users become, the more they camouflage one another. In this way, sharks can hide among minnows.

Today, because Navy officials did–maybe to their dismay–understand the unforgiving logic of espionage–anyone can read the Onion Router source code and contribute to it. It is a civilian project–the Tor Project–and a non-profit organization.

Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, computer scientists trained at MIT, do most of the research and programming to improve Tor. They are idealistic fellows. They say in their mission statement, “…for human rights workers, journalists, democracy activists and many others world-wide, anonymity online can be an issue of life and livelihood. The Tor Project believes that we should have the same expectation of privacy online as we have in the real world….”

Yet, how does Tor look to the Chinese government, or to the government of Iran, Syria, or even Russia? Or to zealous nationalists of those countries? They may look over the shoulders of Dingledine and Mathewson. They may see the propaganda arm and war machine of the West.

Ordinary People Help One Another

In so-called open societies, though, people see the issue differently. Most Westerners disdain censorship. The Tor button for Firefox has been downloaded three million times. Lots of those freeloading downloaders–the ones with a broadband Internet connection–could also be offering the Tor service. A remaining question: do home computer users have permission to run an Internet server program that gives services to people outside their house? The answer is: maybe.

The Acceptable Use Policy of many Internet Service Providers–such as Verizon and Earthlink–explicitly prohibits residential customers from running any Internet server program. AT&T and Comcast’s iBurst do not. To check any company’s policy, type its name and “AUP” into a search engine.

What are the prohibitive ISPs worried about? That a customer will run an enterprise using most of the contracted bandwidth round-the-clock. That traffic could strain the ISP’s gear, hurt service to other customers, and get the ISP sued. By prohibiting all server programs, the company saves its employees the work of researching each customer’s case.

A little arithmetic shows how harmless and costless to her ISP Abigail actually will be if she offers Tor to the world, instead of merely using it herself. Let’s say that she has a 1 MB broadband connection. She considers setting aside a maximum at any given time of 20 kilobytes per second for a Tor bridge, since bridges are now needed most urgently. A kilobyte is one-thousandth of a megabyte. Abigail, at maximum burst, will have 1/50th of her broadband connection busy with Tor users. She is paying $50 per month. She will have to decide for herself what her conscience permits. Then she can help her grandchildren set up Tor on their computers.

A person who sets up a Tor relay gets to give it a name. Bill McGonigle, the man in Lebanon, New Hampshire, who was moved by the Iranian election protesters, also admires John Lennon’s music. He calls his relay, “imagineallthepeople.”

Legal guidance for people running Tor relays in the United States
Video of a talk by Roger Dingledine

An Electron Filling Station in Every Neighborhood?

Rhona — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:48:39 +0000

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.

“The ability to drive a car is not limited by the battery or the range of the car, it’s limited by the range of deployment of the infrastructure.” Shai Agassi, Melbourne, Australia, October 23, 2008.

No Man is an Island, But Israel Is

It is time to relearn geography. Israel’s borders with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt are closed. To the west lies the Mediterranean. Politics and the sea isolate the country.

Israel imports all its cars. The tax on internal combution ones is 160 percent; on electric cars it is ten percent. A hybrid, like the Toyota Prius, counts as an internal combustion car. Agassi encouraged this difference in taxation by charming the right Israelis (including President Shimon Peres), many of whom dislike buying oil from unfriendly Arab countries.

Because Israel is such a small island, BP can meet demand for electrons with only 1000 electron stations. The country now has only 200 gasoline stations. This week, gasoline costs about U.S. $5 per gallon.

All electricity in Israel distributed on the national grid comes from the government-owned Israel Electric Corporation. The government backs Agassi’s plan; he hopes the managers of the utility will cooperate with him. If the Israel Electric grid watchers tell BP that one area or another is straining to supply demand, BP can reduce the rate of its battery recharging in that area. Agassi’s dream is that all the additional electricity demand that his cars create will come from renewable sources. Israel is a good place to experiment with solar generation of electricity. Batteries are a good place to store electricity whose time of production doesn’t match its time of consumption.

Last, according to Quin Garcia, the Better Placer running the demonstration car program, few Israelis mind being tracked by a GPS device. After all, they happily carry everywhere their homing-beacon cell phones. The computer in each BP car, running the company’s proprietary software, will tell the driver when the battery’s charge is low, where the nearest recharge or swap station is, and, perhaps, to accelerate and brake more smoothly. Who keeps, and for how long, all that data about each car’s movements? Don’t worry about it, says Mr. Garcia. Apparently, BP will leave those concerns to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the country’s counterpart to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Denmark is also an Island

Recheck your map. Denmark shares only about 50 miles of border with Germany; the rest is seashore. Like Israel, it is easy to saturate with electron stations. The government has imposed a 180 percent registration tax on internal combustion cars to encourage electric ones. Gasoline costs about U.S.$6 per gallon. Denmark is also congenial to BP because it is marvelously rich in wind. The wind blows mainly at night, when Danes are sleeping The big utility, DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas), has actually been giving away its wind-generated electricity to neighboring countries. It has now signed a deal to sell that nocturnal electricity to BP, which hopes to pipe it into the resting automobiles of sleeping Danes. This year, only 20 percent of DONG power comes from wind. The rest, unfortunately, comes from coal. Maybe DONG will build more windmills?

Australia, Demoted

Better Place announced on October 22 that Australia is not a continent, but an island, after all. At least, the eastern coastal stretch from Melbourne through Sydney to Brisbane is a population island. To the east lies the South Pacific, to the west, the sparsely populated desert. AGL Energy says it will supply green electricity for BP cars, but its nearest source is Hydro NSW, a large hydroelectric project. Australians count hydro as green, though American environmentalists do not, because it produces no carbon. Australians now crank out greenhouse gases at the highest per capita rate in the world, because of their coal consumption. It is past time to cut back. The federal government imposes a tax of 33 percent on luxury cars, defined as those costing more than AU $57,000 (US $36,700). So far it imposes no tax on inexpensive internal-combustion cars. Gasoline costs about US$3 per gallon. Agassi hopes that once his firm has set up in the population center of the country, it can expand north and southwest around the coastal rim.

When a Car is a Razor

Or a cellphone. The Better Place customer will buy the car for $20,000 or less and buy a contract. The contract entitles the customer to a specified amount of electricity per time period. BP will retain ownership of the battery, which when manufactured in volume might cost only $10,000. BP plans to get its batteries from AESC, a joint venture by Renault and NEC, that is developing and testing a rechargeable lithium-ion battery for use in automobiles. If the customer doesn’t have to buy the battery, the package is cheap. Republicans, lumberjacks, and eaters of red meat may buy it.

So far, BP has two advantages that most of its competitors lack. It understands that electric cars must be cheap to replace internal combustion cars. It also understands the importance of electron refilling stations. It has chosen to swap out the customer’s old battery quickly, then recharge it slowly in off-peak hours, to avoid straining the electric grid. Chevrolet’s Volt is merely a hybrid, with a gasoline engine to carry drivers past the 40-mile mark. It will also cost $40,000. What disappointing lack of imagination.

A competitor to watch is Daimler-Benz. In a small test-run collaboration with the German electricity supplier, RWE AG, Daimler plans to build 500 charging points in Berlin to power 100 all-electric cars: minute ones from smart and non-minute ones from Mercedes-Benz. It seems to be betting on fast charging, as opposed to Better Place’s fast swapping. What remains to be seen: is Berlin an island?

Thanks to Quin Garcia, head of Supplier Relations and Technical Alliances at Better Place, for his talk to the Silicon Valley chapter of the Electric Auto Association on September 20, 2008.

Very Low-Wattage Desktop Computers: Green, Cheap, and Silent

Rhona — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:52:26 +0000

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.

Small and Smaller

Two inventions made the new, tiny laptop and desktop computers possible: the mini-ITX motherboard and low-power CPU’s. VIA Technologies of Taiwan introduced the mini-ITX motherboard in 2001 for industrial applications, such as running television set-top boxes and electronic kiosks. It was much smaller, at 170 mm by 170 mm (6.7 inches), than the most common personal-computer board, the ATX, which was and still is 305 by 244 mm (12 by 9.6 inches).
By design, the mini-ITX’s built-in chips used little electricity. Hobbyists loved mini-ITX’s and insisted on turning them into general-purpose personal computers, often stuffing them into unlikely cases, such as teddy bears and toasters. Retailers noticed. Now the mini-ITX board is an open industry standard and manufactured by many companies, such as Intel and Jetway.

PC builders typically install on a mini-ITX board a CPU by Intel, Advanced Micro Design (AMD), or VIA . Those CPU’s range widely in electricity consumption, performance, and price, depending on the target application and customer. The thriftiest new CPU’s use very much less than the 45 to 65 watts of traditional ones. The innovation here has been astounding. According to their manufacturers’ claims, Intel’s new 1.6 GHz Atom, for example, draws only 4 watts; AMD Geode LX 900 draws only 1.5 watts; and VIA’s new C7 draws “on average” less than 1 watt. The remarkable thing is not how little electricity these CPU’s sip, but how much fast, sophisticated computing they do with so little electricity.

Cool

A side benefit of the Atom and the other low-wattage CPU’s is that they do not radiate as much heat as traditional ones. Manufacturers can carefully design a heat sink, a lump of heat-conducting material that sits on top of the CPU and carries the unwanted, circuit-cooking heat away from it to the computer’s case, and thence to the surrounding air. Some mini-ITX desktop manufacturers even craft heat-radiating ridges or fins on the outside of their case to speed that conduction. Clever passive heat radiation can make it unnecessary to install a fan inside the case. Leaving out a fan reduces the overall electricity usage of the computer even further.

Quiet

Leaving out a fan has another advantage; the machine runs more quietly. For completely silent operation, companies leave out a spinning hard drive. Asus and the other “netbook” sellers offer versions of their laptops with a solid-state drive (SSD), a giant chunk of motionless “flash” memory, instead of a hard drive. So do the mini-ITX desktop makers. Solid-state drives, though, cost more than hard drives of the same capacity. For $100, it is easy now to buy a 500 GB hard disk drive. That $100 will get you only about 8GB of solid state storage. A noise-sensitive person who knows he needs only 8 GB, though, may be happy to trade away the whirring and chugging.

Show Me the Watts

A very low-consumption mini-ITX desktop with good general performance draws 8 watts when actively calculating (the Aleutia E2). A conventional desktop uses between 100 and 200 watts. For comparison, a typical American refrigerator uses about 500 watts when the electric motor is humming. A 100-watt, incandescent light bulb uses, yes, 100 watts.

Tiny is Cute and Sometimes Useful

The Aleutia E2 computer is 115 mm by 115 mm by 35 mm (in inches: 4.5 by 4.5 by 1.4). Logic Supply’s SolidLogic Little Falls GS-L05 computer is 190 mm by 76 mm by 184 mm (in inches: 7.4 by 3 by 7.2). They are small enough to screw onto the back of a display, and come with mounting brackets to do so. People short on space will find that they take up very little.

Prices

The mini-ITX desktop computers from the companies listed below range in price from $285 to over $1000, depending on the performance of their CPU, RAM, graphics chips, etc.

What Operating System?

The vendors of these computers offer Windows XP and Vista, but those operating systems require a large hard disk, more RAM, a fan, and thus more electricity than the thriftiest mini-ITX configurations. Microsoft also levies a roughly $100 license fee per computer for the Windows OS. A free, highly efficient operating system–such as Linux–takes full advantage of the smallest, cheapest, thriftiest, and silent mini-ITX machines (say, 256 MB of RAM and a 4GB solid-state disk). Linux has matured in ease of use, interoperability with Windows and Apple programs, power, and attractiveness. That’s why Asus, Acer, and HP are shipping so many laptop “netbooks” with Linux installed. Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu team has made a point of designing a version of Linux that is especially pretty and easy to use.

For Whom?

Trading in a big, hot desktop for a tiny, cool one will not cut the average person’s electric bill significantly. People who are short on space, or are delighted by clever, tiny gadgets, or who cherish silence, or are greening every appliance out of principle, or want a low-cost alternative, or can’t wait to connect a keyboard to their toaster should think mini-ITX.

Where to Buy

Open Source Voting: Transparent, Cheap, and You Get to Read Your Ballot

Rhona — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 23:00:56 +0000

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 on it that the polling station’s bar-code reader can count quickly. Third and best of all, the software that runs the system is not secret, like the software running the machines sold by Diebold, Hart Intercivic, and Sequoia. Dechert and his colleagues have published much of it at SourceForge.net. That’s why the software is called “open source”; the source code–the program that the programmer wrote–is open to inspection. Any and all of the tens of thousands of people around the world who learned the Python programming language in high school, college, or later can check over the program for mistakes and security weaknesses. Go ahead; take a look at it. As crytographer Bruce Schneier has written, anybody can invent a system that he himself can’t crack. You don’t know whether other people can crack it until you give them a chance. By publishing the software program and inviting comments and cracking attempts, the writers get to improve the program. This world-wide, collaborative improvement is a virtue of open source software. For full credit, though, Dechert and his buddies will have to publish the full version of the program.

The Open Voting system has one more advantage; it is cheap. Like most authors of open source software, Dechert, et al., are not selling the program. They are giving it away for free. Moreover, no special, proprietary machinery is necessary to run it. It runs on off-the-shelf touch screens, bar-code readers, computers, and printers that many different manufacturers sell. Your county can shop around for the best deals it can get on those machines, on-line and at the local shopping center.

Is It as Easy as They Say?

I had a chance to vote on an OVC machine in August, 2008, at the LinuxWorld convention in San Francisco. The OVC people had set up a little polling station to give people a chance to see the system in action. When I went in, a poll worker handed me an empty manila folder. I walked into the polling booth and found a touch screen and a Hewlett Packard printer. The touch screen listed my choices in big print. I pressed on my choices. The printer chugged and printed out an 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper. That was my ballot. I read over my choices. Yup, I disapprove of Digital Rights Management and approve of Barack Obama. I slipped my ballot into the manila folder.

At the exit of the polling station, I fed my ballot into the bar-code reader. If people later suspect mistakes or mischief, they can refeed the ballots through the bar-code reader, or a different bar-code reader, or read them with their own eyeballs and count them with their own hands.

Barriers to Adoption

Why aren’t we voting with free, transparent software on cheap machines that give us paper ballots? First, ignorance. Many states and counties don’t know that the option exists. Second, money. Some states require that a voting system pass tests before it gets adopted. That’s a wise policy. Unfortunately, many states also require the proponents of the voting system to pay a fee for the test. Who pays the fee to test free software that runs on off-the-shelf hardware sold by many competing companies? Dechert, et al., won’t make any money from sales of the software or of the hardware. They have no future revenue stream, no venture capitalist support. They are proposing that states should charge only a low fee, or no fee at all, for tests of open source systems. Getting states to make this change, though, will take time. How many elections will take place in that time?

Los Angeles Leads the Way

Debra Bowen, California’s Secretary of State, has asked officials in Los Angeles County to consider adopting the Open Voting Consortium’s voting system. The fellow in charge is Dean Logan. I have exchanged email with his assistant, Paul Drugan.

He confirmed for me on September 19, 2008, that, “You are correct that we met with representatives of the [Open Voting] project, who gave Mr. Logan and his staff a system demonstration. Currently, we are simply reviewing possible systems and are not in a decision making mode at this time.”

He has declined to describe for me their decision-making criteria or schedule. If you live in Los Angeles County and plan to vote some time, feel free to follow up. The email address of L.A.’s Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk is: voterinfoATrrcc.lacounty.gov.

Running an election for Los Angeles County would be a challenging and revealing test for the OVC. LA has over four million voters. The biggest election that the OVC project has run so far is the one that I voted in. It had 816 voters. Should smaller counties also be running live tests? Would your county be interested?

How to Find Your Own Electric Vehicle

Rhona — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:44:59 +0000

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.

Seeing the latest electric cars

Rhona — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:35:37 +0000

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.

Some of the vendors at the show were:

AC Propulsion, from San Dimas, California
CityE, from Denmark
Green Rides, from Campbell, California.
Zap!, from Santa Rosa, California
Zenn Motor Company, from Toronto, Canada

Local hobbyists also brought their homemade contraptions: converted, all-electric sedans, racing cars, pick-up trucks, dune buggies, motorcycles, and dirt bikes. Most of them ran on lead-acid batteries.

I learned some terminology: a “personal vehicle” carries only one person; a “neighborhood vehicle” has a top speed of 35 or 40 miles per hour (45 to 65 kilometers per hour); and a “highway commuter” can drive at least 50 mph (80 kph). Also, a powered two-wheeler without pedals that can drive no faster than 35 mph is, in California, a “moped.” You don’t need a motorcycle license to drive one here.

I’m in the market, then, for a neighborhood vehicle. I want it to transport my carpool, me and four schoolchildren, on city streets at 35 mph. I saw a homemade, 5-person car that I liked: a VW that, years ago, had been stripped down and converted into a dune buggy, then recently emptied out and converted into an all-electric car. I was surprised to see that it needed twelve lead-acid batteries, six per side, which together weighed 400 pounds. Ouch! Lead-acid batteries may be cheap and ubiquitous, but they are awfully heavy.

I also want a personal vehicle. I’d love a silent motorcycle. The yellow E-Ranger Scooter, on the right here, from Green Emotor was on sale for about $2700. My neighbor bought one then and there. I hope to drive hers and see how I like it. I think, though, that I’d rather have a motorcycle that can reach 50 mph so that I can take it on the highway. The motorcycles for sale at the show were stylish and pricey: $8000 for this blue one, on the right, from Electric Motorsport that ran on lithium-ion batteries. The one that appealed most to me was a homebrew, converted from a gasoline-powered Kawasaki.

To read more about the rally, see The San Jose Mercury News article.

Do you want an electric vehicle? What kind? What is the most you are willing to pay?