Open source election software

Read this article about the announcement earlier this week of an open source election system that was made publicly available. Now read this wee little blog post about why this isn’t providing us much in the way of guarantees.

The open source nature of the code is helpful in the long run, but it provides absolutely nothing in the way of assurance to voters. Ben Adida’s Helios Voting System provides voters with a cryptographic, verifiable receipt that their vote was counted. Commercial implementations or Open Source versions of this software would both still need to provide a cryptographic receipt. That’s your proof. That’s something that can support the weight of democracy.

Yahoo Search Usage

The Gap Between Google and Rivals May Be Smaller Than You Think – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
Over the last 5 years or so I have seen, based on traffic to my sites, Yahoo and Microsoft (MSN, Live and now Bling) fall to less than 5 percent total share of all traffic… combined.

I didn’t make that comment, but I could have.  It’s possible that the world is misinterpreting comScore numbers, but nobody I know sees >5% of their referrals coming from Yahoo and Microsoft.  I’m sure such sites exist, but the comScore figures that we see on a regular basis would have us believe that this is quite normal.  It’s not.