Posted 3:49 PM (0) comments

Saving Democracy

Amid all the Chicken Little moaning and groaning about electronic voting, there's at least one voice crying in the wilderness. The very "wilderness" of the San Jose Mercury, that is, where tech columnist Mike Langberg today pointed out that it was the opponents of change who posed a threat to electronic voting, and not electronic voting which posed a threat to democracy.

Amid all the Cassandra-like rantings about hackers breaking into electronic voting machines and the need for a paper trail, Langberg rightly points out: "Few politicians have enough computer smarts to alter electronic voting machine software; it would be much easier to run off a handful of phony paper ballots, blame the resulting mismatch on faulty computers and get legitimate votes thrown in the trash."

Full marks to this man who demands that we stop the breast-beating and ask, "Will electronic systems, when implemented with a reasonable degree of caution, be more secure than what we've got now?"
The only true answer is, "yes."

Posted 1:13 PM (0) comments

Faceted Id - context in identity management

I listened to a fascinating presentation this morning at the Emerging Technology Conference, given by danah boyd entitled "Revenge of the User: Lessons from Creator/User Battles". Hard to tell from the title, but it was about so-called "social software" (e.g., Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn, etc.) and its inability to provide context along with identity to its series of relationships. To Friendster, everyone is either your "friend" or, essentially, a non-entity. There is no degree of friendship and, more importantly, no way to segregate some relationships from others. She mentioned the case of a high-school teacher who was taunted mercilessly by her students because of the social "friends" listed for her entry at one social software site. Yet, in the real, physical world the two groups (students, friends) would never meet.

I was envisioning a link to identity management's persona/role entities. After the discussion, I found boyd's Master's thesis, "Faceted Identity:
Managing representation in a digital world", which introduces the term context as a way of differentiating among various personae and roles. Fascinating, and I urge those with an interest in IdM to read it.

Posted 6:54 AM (0) comments

I didn't do it and I didn't mean to, either.

I wasted two hours yesterday listening to Joe Trippi (Howard Dean's former campaign manager) drone on. The gist of his message - "it wasn't my fault! The broadcast media did us in." But whenever the erstwhile front-runner finishes fourth, it very well is the fault of the campaign manager!

Clay Shirkey, as he so often does, has the best "final word" on the Dean debacle. Too many people, it seems, were supporting the internet and anyone who they thought "got it". But these people weren't voters in Iowa or New Hampshire (heck, some may have thought Dean was running for president of the Internet - especially after the Gore endorsement!). The Dean campaign - and Mr. Trippi - ended up believing their own press releases, a very fatal flaw.