Dave Kearns

The Luddites who are out to cripple electronic voting (see here, here , here, and here) have found a new ally in the new California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen. According to stories in the San Jose Mercury, Bowen supposedly did a “top to bottom” review of electronic voting machines which found them vulnerable to attack. But the methodology used was to give the machine to a group of hackers, give them a laboratory to work in, and ask them to break into and modify the machines! As numerous county elections officials (not to mention eVoting system vendors) said, “it didn’t take into account their expertise or the security procedures they’ve already put into place to deter tampering and fraud”. As one of them (Contra Costa County registrar Stephen Weir) put it: “I am sorry to say that I find the approach of the so-called top-to-bottom review to be more to do with headlines than with definitive science or the pursuit of legitimate public policy.“

The eVoting machines tested are no less accurate, safe and secure than currently employed voting methods – and are much more accurate, safe and secure than many of them. That’s all we can ask of the technology. Can it be improved? Certainly, but only after being widely deployed so that a large pool of user experience can be gathered. It’s time for the Chicken Luddles get out of the way of legitimate progress.

Shelley Powers, over at Burningbird, sums up one of the major problems with today’s social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, et al) – they’re simply the grade school playground we knew in our youth “all growed up.” -

The younger the person the more self-absorbed and that’s natural; after all, it takes experience to become empathetic. Over time, society and our interactions within it help most (not all) of us to see beyond just our own needs, our own wants. We become friends with people outside our age group, race, class, or country. We learn that being aware of others, their needs and feelings, isn’t the same as ‘selling out’; nor is it destructive of ‘self’.

However, what I’m seeing with some of the social networking sites (just some, not all), is that rather than expose people to different viewpoints, they can reinforce barriers against the the natural processes that abrade self-absorbed behavior. When challenged in one’s day to day life to give o’er our preconceptions or biases, rather than learn to adapt and grow socially, we can rush home and twitter, blog, and Facebook with others who have exactly our same point of view.

This is really no different than when I was growing up, we all lived in “ghettos” of one sort or another and came running home from any kind of non-conforming challenge to “hang with our homies” and have our stereotypes and prejudices reinforced. Only now our playground is world-wide.

Pete Wilson died Friday night. Not the former governor, but the KGO-TV newscaster (and KGO radio talk-show host). It was quite shocking, really, as Wilson died on the operating table at Stanford Hospital while undergoing hip-replacement surgery. He would have appreciated the irony, though, of dying where there was state-of-the-art life-saving equipment available, and knowledgeable people to use it. That’s the sort of newscaster he was – there was no agenda of the left or the right, no “pretty-boy” hair and smile, no “side”. Pete Wilson was as close as we get these days to an “everyman” in journalism. You know that, unlike the brainless airheads who seem to be the majority of newscasters, Pete questioned the stories presented to him. But he wasn’t sanctimonious about it, the way Walter Cronkite grew to be. Cronkite epitomized the adjective “avuncular”. Wilson, on the other hand, always had a twinkle in his eye that said “I’m the uncle who’ll sneak you in to the places your mother doesn’t want you to go.”

Pete Wilson was my age (we were both born in ’45) which, I guess, brings his death even closer to home. But the major sadness is that I never did get to sit down with him, have a beer and talk over the momentous events of the day – whether that was a war tens of thousands of miles away, or a baseball game in the city.

OmiGod! It rained today here in the bay area – first time there’s ever been measurable rain in San Jose on July 18th. It’s cleared out now, and the sun is back in the sky where it belongs, but – for just a little while there – I’d thought that I was back on the east coast.

We’re live! davekearns.com is on the air. Or on the ether, at least. Still while I feel my way around WordPress and this new hosting environment, we won’t be publicizing things very much….

Welcome to WordPress. This is the first post, but we’re still feeling our way around…..