Paper Votes are a Gem

I watched Hacking Democracy, this evening. Depressing.

The US use automated voting machines built by private companies, certified by other private companies and closed source. The main scary demonstration was a man in the middle attack that was so simple as to be hilarious and clearly changed a mock election result.

I'm sure that there are alternatives and probably plenty of open source voting platforms out there. I mean it is a simple enough technical challenge to solve. But when you think about using something malleable like a computer to 'automate' aspects of a vote you are asking for trouble. I mean, if you think about it any closed source voting system is by definition a man in the middle. Your vote is subject to a process you can't see. Better to have the Australian system that involves lots of people.

For those that don't know how it goes. Once your vote is in the sealed ballot box it goes nowhere. About half an hour before the doors close the counters appointed by the Electoral Commission are joined by representatives of the parties and in some cases members of the public. At 6 the doors are closed and locked. The ballot boxes are opened and fall onto a big desk for all to see. The scrutineers get to observe the count and wander freely (though don't interact except to sign that they were present).

When a vote is unclear the Electoral Commission folks  discuss it openly in front of the scrutineers to try and ascertain the will of the voter. The entire process is open, as are the check counts, as is the reconciliation of ballots versus the number of folks marked off against the role for that booth. The results are public record and kept as are the original ballots in case of recount. Our system is sooooooooo much better than in the US. Democracy is messy. The more people involved in it the less chance of wide spread rigging.

When you think of all the polling booths across the country during a federal election think of the thousands of volunteers scrutineering on behalf of their parties, or themselves and the dozens of lowly paid counters. It is a hidden gem in Australian society and I suspect widely misunderstood. Don't ever trust efficiency and automation in the core institutions of government. Now all we need is to stop as a society electing snoozers on both sides of politics and we'll be all good!

Goodbye Gunns, It's Been Fun

What is the lesson of Gunns going broke? Well surely it must be that if you don't run your core business well all the projects in the world won't save you. In addition, I contend that the dollar was always going to rise with the mining boom and as it did any business case was going to be eroded beyond viability. 

As for Government. The willingness by both Gunns and the Government of the day to distort due process to the point of borderline corruption was a disgrace. Folks have been talking about the Tasmanian Government presenting a sovereign risk to potential investors. This is absolutely to true but perhaps not just in the sense the TCCI thinks.

IMHO, a modern government of any moderate persuasion should try to set the market conditions and then leave it alone. A government the intervenes on one project on behalf of one corporate entity is distorting the broader market. 

My heart goes out to all those loosing their jobs during this time. Also, it goes out to those self funded retirees and others who hold guns shares. I don't believe that the board ever made it clear at any AGM that the pulp mill was an all or nothing bet. 

Mack

Hobart windmills mean for ugly big time

So I'm sitting here with a cold, trying not to think about work and how useless I am to the place when I am unwell, ideas and opinions are starting to fall out of my head at pace. My letter to the Mercury's editor and whoever else I decide to flick it to. Probably a little long-winded for the Merc, but we'll see.

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The windmills on the Marine Board building are set to start spinning once again. It seems folks are at extremes of this debate. Either you are all for them - right on, save the trees and all that - or else you live in fear of it raining gigantic steak knives the next time you are out to dinner or a drink on a windy Hobart night.

It's interesting too, to hear the view of the proponent (Mr Kirke) in last Monday's Mercury, viz. more windmills on more buildings, with perhaps the Hydro building next on the list. Get off it, how much uglier do you want to make the most beautiful city in Australia? I'd love to see Alderman Sexton enter this debate with a little more vision and vigour.

Hobart could surely lead the world in small scale renewables, but destroying roof-lines and vistas is in my opinion, not the way to do it. Retrofitting wind turbines, solar panels and the like to existing structures for marginal power generation is a really inefficient use of resources. Such installations tend to be less than ideal no matter how good the hardware. The only thing making them viable (speaking as a rebate recipient myself) is the government handouts. Which were, as I recall, about giving a new industry a leg up as much as they were about greenwash.

To put forward an alternative. Perhaps if land could be set aside by the council for community alternative energy parks, with small plots tied to ratepayers' existing residential land titles. Such a place, surely, could generate more electricity for less money in a concentrated and ideal spot. My one kilowatt system could have become two or three just through the economies of scale of big grid-tie inverters, bulk purchases and a good location.

HCC has already shown its willingness to think forward and invest, as an example, just look at the pilot methane recovery plant at the Hobart tip. I ask them and in particular Ald Sexton, to lead the community again now. Those of us concerned about where power is being generated and how, will contribute to such a project and either offset our rates or power bills with what is generated.

To me, it seems a way to get the warm fuzzy feeling of green orthodoxy without inciting the neighbors to violence through shade. As for the Marine board building wind mills? Keep them, we're getting used to them now, they can be our reminder of the evils of tokenism.

Sincerely
Ian Mackintosh, Deep Bay

Household requirements for Erin and I

Imbecilic notes for the new house.

Narrative
Held on the hill, had a few very good seasons and then the bush reclaimed it. Lee Archer VDL store-esk converted to apple shed.

Store has grown as it's uses have evolved. Front warehouse, 3 storey random stone shamelessly lifted from Lee Archers design at Stanley (pictured). Third floor mostly within roof-line. Mostly to Georgian geometry with a few nods to practicality, loft lift higher than ridge line, etcetera. Random stone.

Second building local vernacular. Vertical boards. Two storey (running back up the hill so meeting the upper two storeys of the first structure.

As the collection of commercial buildings devolves into bush, its formality diminishes to the point of a semi detached tractor shed as the site runs up the hill.

Calling the Tasmanian Election

The chase 10 - 9 - 6

As I type this on the final evening of campaigning by parties for the 2010 lower house election, I am in thought. By the end of this post I'll put in my two cents as to who I believe will be picking up the 10 (Labor or liberal).

The John Dowling Soliloquy

What a muppet this man must be. To send that pamphlet to all and sundry quoting Hansard out of context in a debate where the Greens sided with government. Backed up with robocalls from a Labor party hack. That isn't scrutiny that's just fuckwitted.

John Dowling comes onto ABC radio (936) after folk had started calling in regarding the unsolicited robocalls with no authorisation message. John's response was along the lines of yeah it was us, no it isn't a requirement for Labor to carry an authorisation message and other Australian Governments have done it. Oh yeah and Obama did it so it must be cool.

Ok lets break this down:

• No authorisation is required. You are dead right John, you don't have to carry the message when telemarketing, but when resorting to such shit campaigning having the guts to tack on to the end of it who you are is in the spirit fairness. Most people will have hung up long before they got to it anyway.
  
  Anyway, people don't like telemarketers much less automated ones.
   
• Robocalls by Australian Government have happened in the past. Right again John. I think the one you were referring to was John Howard... A liberal... In an election he lost... massively... after the Labor campaigned against such ugliness.
   
• Robocalls were used by Obama. But the US Democrats were peddling a message of hope, that was positive and about what they stood for and carried an authorisation. It was also still contentious.
   

Websites

So if one goes to the website's of the major parties what does one find. Anyone passingly interested in the outcome of an election should do this rather than suck it through the Mercury, Advocate or TV.

I have included extracts from an exhaustive and as yet unpublished book on political website creation in Australia. It's called www.jeff.gone

www.liberal.org

• Rule 2 - Don't carry graphical content with words like 'Labor Budget Bombshell'. FAIL Shit like that just reminds us all what we don't like about you.
  
  
• Rule 7 - Don't carry photos of every person that is vaguely important in your party as your banner. FAIL
  You must be aware that you look like a bunch of politicians.
  
  
• Rule in every book on web publishing since IBM and the 'flaming logo' - Have whitespace. Fail Seriously guys it's a shit site, I know you are all pro-nepotism, but getting someone's 14 year old daughter to design the site because she did a really colourful job with her myspace page... Not good.
  
  
• Rule 1 - Have an obvious front page link to policy. SUCCESS!
  Well done
  
  
• Rule 1.5 - Have the policy link lead to a policy page somewhere. FAIL
  
  

  For information about the State Liberal Team's policies, please go to http://tasliberal.com.au/policy or phone 03 6224 1015 or email policy@tas.liberal.org.au *Sigh*   Rule 2087 - Be clear and don't suggest anything involving magnets. FAIL Make Tasmania a magnet is not a clear heading for a policy. What are you thinking Wil? 70,000 kilometres of copper wire, all the hydroelectricity, a larger than average nail and we attract all the world's tin pot dictators. Yes I am aware tin is non-ferrous. Don't ruin it for me.

www.alp.org

• Rule 16 - Don't have a site that is clearly labelled 'beta'. FAIL Labor in government federally for 2.5 years in the state for 12 and their site is running in beta, explains heaps. Ummm, I'd like to report a bug.
  
  
• Rule 23 - Don't have graphics of things you've stuffed up. FAIL
  You are in the process of making a mess of the renewable market. Pictures of wind turbines at sunset is suggestive. Of failure.
   
• Rule 438 - Don't have a thing called LaborTV. FAIL
  We have the ABC that's enough.
   
• Rule 11 - Link to state sites from the federal site. FAIL Two elections on tomorrow in the states and not a link to the TAS or SA ALPs to be seen, I had to Google them, thank god for corporations I say.
  
  
• Rule 12 - If the State websites are terrible Rule 11 doesn't apply. SUCCESS This Terrible ... clearly the work of John Dowling who sacked after the disaster of an election result he has engineered for the comrades.
  
  
• Rule 1 - Have an obvious front page link to policy. FAIL FAIL FAIL
  After pecking around a whole bunch of garbage on the state Labor site, saying how awful the Libs/Greens are I found the policies, in PDF (an awful format), under multiple tabs (awful formatting) with none of them under 500Kb each. Christ no wonder you want us to have broadband rolled out, compression or HTML are clearly too high tech. They are under 'what we stand for' not to be confused with what Labor stand in.
  
  
• Rule 200 - If you are stupid enough to use PDF at least get the graphic design right. FAIL
  This is shit and makes me rage out something savage. It is also a shit policy. It also bolds the word Labor too much.

www.greens.org.au

• Rule 71,234 - Do not offer to send all of your supporters names, addresses and photos to the incumbent government. FAIL
  Admittedly an obscure rule but this is stupid. 'Please send my identifying details and a helpful photo to people that don't agree with my politics, have a poor history of holding onto identifying personal information, have been known to invent names on their party roles and are incumbents in government. Ummmm.
  
  
• Rule 758 - It's not a Green website unless there is a photo of an earnest yet slightly appealing looking hippie chick tied to a tree. FAIL
  Oh wait, found one, widthdrawn

In short, vote for anyone you like. But kudos to the Greens on a good campaign, a good website and not being either Labor or Liberal. We are almost pissed off enough to swallow your unwashed tree hugging nonsense.

Labor 9, Liberal 10, Green 6

Can we please discuss the options for internet filtering and the media market properly!

The following slightly ridiculous post was something I threw up to Facebook a while ago. I wrote the following as an individual only. I work professionally in IT, I’m not a journo or blogger, however I do take an interest in politics. Particularly the politics around broadband and eHealth, the latter of which I was intimately involved.

Anyway see below, revised letter to Minister and personal vent.

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I’m not a writer to politicians generally. However, I do have a decade in enterprise IT under my belt, most of those with government and I was a functionary in one of the former government’s more successful broadband initiatives (Broadband for Health - $35 million subsidy program and nobody got electrocuted). I’m not a Liberal supporter and working for Abbott was one of the dirtier professional feelings I have ever encountered. At the time I consoled myself by being an apolitical civil servant, implementing good public policy and trying not to notice that Abbott has more rows of teeth than your average white pointer, seriously next time he smiles on TV you watch. If he bit your leg while surfing it would be hard work to convince him you weren’t a seal. That they allow him in the water at all to compete in triathlons amazes me... But I digress, sorry...

I am now working in the private sector so feel I can speak more freely about matters of public policy. I am writing this in my capacity as an individual. The business I work for would not be effected by policy decisions made in respect to content rights holders, ISPs and their responsibilities or really anything in that debate going on at the moment. I am not a paid up member of any political party.

For what it’s worth I’m offering my commentary on the position in which you the Minister find yourself regarding the ‘great firewall’ and suggesting a possible alternate path. I’m not going to scream, rail against big business, or your political alignment.

The firewall debate is in need of a reboot, it has been derailed by political interests, presumably ALP factional interests and is leading you towards a dead end. Any scheme you suggest will be framed by the debate as it is now presented, such a firewall set up is likely to fall over at a level of detail which your Department cannot control and most Australian’s may fail to fully understand. This is what happened to Garrett, the insulation and solar programs were not that much of a cock up, it is just that it was relying on Australian tradies not to be dodgy. Now you have a situation where people just smile when they see the bald one on TV and quietly hum the lyrics from ‘the Beds are Burning’ and wonder where he got politics so wrong... Wait, digressing again.

I (and I would like to think most) will support a national firewall when one can be demonstrated that is difficult or impossible to circumvent, transparent in terms of its administration and not subject to political interference. At the moment what is proposed is none of these. Folk are rightly comparing the current proposal to China’s solution, so in short you are stuffed. What is proposed is bad public policy, badly packaged and will win you nothing in the senate (as in votes of the religious right). It’s impact on the ALP vote at the federal election is something you can guess.

It seems to me that the firewall is less about protecting society than it is about protecting established media interests and information delivery mechanisms, while being a sop to the religious views of a minority. The issue of content that supports or depicts illegal activity should not be confused with issues of copyright unless you intend to address both problems.

As I see it there are three sets of issues linked by one enabling technology, the internet.

Namely:
1. A bloody big darknet exists (in the form of the torrenting/sharing community) that contains everything from the episode of the Simpsons I may have missed the other night, a legal Linux distribution that I need to get in a hurry, terrorist guides to being an asshole, nutter manifestos and (frankly) a disturbing amount of pornography. It is also near indestructible.

2. Rights holders are struggling to control the distribution mechanisms for content which once upon a time generated the bulk of their profits. The oft cited ‘old business models that are failing’.

3. The darknet of P2P contains an amount of material that is illegal or poses a risk to societal values. The exact amount is really anyone's guess.

If filtering is the solution to any of the above problems, I really don’t see how. It will leave an agency – private or public – jumping at shadows forever. Even if fully implemented the firewall cannot succeed against the challenges above.

P2P infrastructure is fluid and driven at scale by a demand for free media and pirated software which is so large that attempts to shut it down just causes it to morph into another technology and pop back up. The people who write it are pretty bright, numerous and willing to work for the pleasure of annoying you. These people cannot be reasoned with in the traditional sense. Incidentally, I do not include myself in this bucket, I am neither bright nor numerous and I'd rather be paid for the majority of my work. The unpaid minority of what I do goes into writing poorly worded and misspelt treaties to your good self, written for the pleasure of annoying you J... Sorry digressing again.

Solution
Be bold... Change the debate.

Firstly, show some faith in people by educating them about what is out there and how to navigate safely. Then let them use the internet in an informed way and monitor their families internet use in an informed way, if that is their thing. There are a lot of new school halls and well skilled IT teachers that I’m sure could enable such a policy. Want to get folk in to such courses, make a family tax bonus dependant on either a) attending such a course or b) presenting one.

Secondly, it is time to show the media companies that their old business models are stuffed (or at least dated). Don’t tell them. Don’t encourage them. SHOW THEM. The idea of any broadcast being worth something substantial when the preferred distribution channel (be it illegal or legit) is paid for by the consumer is absurd. This is what is driving P2P on the internet. These days content is valuable on first run only, after that all you have is merchandise. The merchandise may have a DVD in it, but it is still merchandise.

Maybe while you are educating folk, educate them on ethics. I baulk at paying anything for crap TV full of ads, yet I will make a point of buying the DVDs of shows that I like, regardless of where I saw them first. Is it unethical to use Youtube, p2p, whatever to watch new things and make an assessment as to whether it is worth paying for? Perhaps.

So it’s late and I’m failing to get to the point. Allow me to stream of consciousness an idea for you. Forgive the odd typo.

Take, say a $600pa license fee per internet subscriber. Earmark half the revenue for registered content distributors. If say Sony BMG registers, then all their content (otherwise available in Aus) must be made available free of charge and DRM to the ISPs. The other half of the generated funds is a quasi-lottery based on submissions (say a 3 minute youtube) to generate content by the artists themselves. Some are selected by panels, some by popular vote/number of previews, some at random. This fund can support artists and be tuned to cater to the whim of whatever minority vote Government is after. You can also assign quotas based on classification. If you want to gear society towards the 50s conservative fantasy that some have well it will be G, PG and educational classifications that get the bulk of the generated funds. If you want to gear society towards the last days of Sodom well it had better be R and X. Changing such quotas is also a promise that is easily kept and implemented at election time. ‘We are family friendly, no more French erotica funded via SBS, it is open university from here on out’. If the government of the day is concerned that their children are being raised by Homer Simpson well turn the policy dial around to favour locally produced content.

Focusing the content through such a mechanism to attract funding, also forces corporations/artists hoping to receiving money through one point. This allows you to apply classification to content without needing to control the technology.

In my model all big media content must go up DRM free on the ISP servers. What people download, watch and how they rate it drives the slice of the license fee pie the media companies get to take away. Look at it as a kind of opensource BBC. The market force becomes one of quality and popular media content driving revenue, rather than say dominant players in an oligopoly pedaling shit.

Ads are still allowed in the DRM free content. An automatic balancing force if a media supplier puts too many ads in their media is that someone will re-edit the content and redistribute it P2P with no ads. In such a scenario, companies will get nothing if they inject too many ads because content will go viral with them edited out attracting no recorded views and consequently no more votes.

Allow first run TV to be seen on Freeview or PayTV say one week in front of the content being distributed to the ISPs. That allows adverts to retain some mindshare and retains viewers and value in Freeview.

Results
Multiple streams of praise if you put this in and the posturing you are going to have no matter what you do.

The ISPs love you because expensive P2P traffic goes through the floor, this is a cost to them now as little Jimmy is getting his dodgy copy of Lost from Portugal, Canada, USA, etc. The people love you because the content that should be cheap and democratic becomes so. The live music venues rejoice because talent has to tour again. Genuine artists love you because they have an artistic merit based system to help them become and remain established. The police love you because P2P traffic dropping away leaving only the truly dodgy must make it an easier environment to enforce law. And Steve Fielding can be fobbed off (ahem have his concerns addressed) by assuring him 40% of the quota for the next 3 years will be Religious Adventures in the Barossa. And of course the mainstream will revolt come election time and sweep him away.

Don't think it is economic? Well most economists didn't see the GFC which puts lie to their quasi-science anyway. Youtube is an economic weopon, yes it makes losses but it's point is Google is resetting the media market and playing a long game. And at the end of the day you are the government and should get to dictate certain aspect of the market, not Google. Besides what do you think will be going over the much vaunted National Broadband Network? The NBN is in need of a killer app otherwise it is going to look really bad for Labor.

Implementation plan.
No feasibility study, start modular, build organically and be flexible.
Or
Better described as ‘lead all the horses to water, the one's that won't drink will be trampled to death by the hordes that will’.

Facilitate the changes to the law, tell big media it is a trial which they can take or leave . Nobody forces them to make their media available.

Indicate that any internet subscriber signing up to the yearly license model will not be prosecuted for possessing or distributing unlicensed media otherwise legal for broadcast in Australia. This can be achieved without changing the Act.

If big media doesn't get on board straight away fine, the program will potter along being an artist support program and the amount of license funding earmarked for big media will just accrue. Eventually it will become too tempting and someone in big media will break ranks and release content onto the network to try and claim some funds. They may even find it profitable!

Such a move would redefine the media market place in a way that would evolve with time and technology. It would allow matters of censorship to be addressed with transparency of process. -Added Later: it would not require a wholesale rewrite of copyright legislation

Moving the debate to one where the inequities in the present system are addressed while encouraging ethical behaviour by content providers and consumers alike is a better way. The approach proposed picks up the current trends in media consumption and pricing and gives big media some hope of transitioning to new business models, as opposed to failing and having to be reinvented.