I'm posting this in a thread in alt.politics.greens, crossposted every which way. Might as well copy it here.

> What numb nuts
> decided to design a voting machine that *doesn't* produce a paper
> track?

That's not a bug, it's a feature! Seriously. Think for a minute. Diebold builds ATM machines. ATM machines have paper trails and transaction auditing and support the chain of custody the banks require. If Diebold (and Sequoia and ES&S) wanted to, they would build voting machinery that does authenticatable ballots and end-to-end auditing and real recounts. It's not rocket science.

The current generation of voting machinery was brought in specifically to make recounts impossible. The Help
America Vote Act was a classic trojan horse attack against election integrity. (The "horse" was the false claim that there's a big problem with physically challenged people voting. The soldiers inside the horse were the vapor-ballot machines.) And it worked. US elections were flawed before, but now there's not even a way to know how flawed they are. No wonder we won't let the UN election observers watch.

Cameron

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The other thing I write about a lot in public fora is the Microsoft monopoly and its alternatives. It's an area where the Greens I meet mostly have the same attitudes and assumptions as the general public. We get it about farmer's markets and sweatshop-free clothing and low-power FM and GMO-free agriculture but we've got a blind spot for the software monopoly and the movement that's busting it.

Well, Greens in the US anyway. The Green Group in the European Parliament leads the struggle against software patents. Greens were all over the computer facilities at this year's Social Forum, which ran on Debian.

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Between 95% and 97% of email arriving at my main server is junk. Spam or malware or both. I understand this fraction is typical.

I'm defending by blocking emails from areas that send nothing but spam ever. Almost everybody does that to some degree. We also try to block email with spam artifacts in it. Spammers use special software ("spamware" or "ratware") and it makes mistakes that real email software doesn't. Our email software can recognize some of them. For example, I don't know anybody with "lotto" or "lottery" in their email address, so we can block obvious stuff like that.

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Folks have been telling me to start a blog for years, and I just keep posting the same stuff to Usenet and the news.com fora instead.

So here's the plan. I've opened a weblog on the spam crisis as seen from a Green political perspective, Spammers versus Freedom. I'm not keeping my affiliation secret, but I'm going to let that perspective speak for itself. Maybe I'll come out as a Green once I get some traction.

Spam means the end of email as we have known it, and the community that is trying to stop it has been less than effective. I think it's partly because of mistaken political assumptions. They don't get how law enforcement favors spammers because it favors businessmen and the spammers have been very effective at positioning themselves as marketing entrepreneurs and not the criminals that they are. They don't see that same bias in the general media and the trade press.

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