Voting Machines: Complaint against last German Bundestag elections turned down

As several sources have reported, the German Bundestag just decided that the formal complaints of voters against the use of insecure voting machines in the last Bundestag elections are void.

The Bundestag decided to reject those complaints by using pre-worded statements from the Ministry of Interior, some of which can be technically proven to be wrong. It is a real pity - but what do you expect if you ask those people who got elected, whether they accept that election ;) It's also quite embarrassing to see such complaints to be dragged on for more than one year. We're talking about complaints about the Elections on September 18, 2005. I think this says a lot about the state of democracy in this country, and the carelessness of those in power towards a fair and equal election process.

This is why the original plaintiffs now are preparing a lawsuit in front of the federal constitutional court. In order to be filed, some 100 signatures of German voters in support of this lawsuit are required. This shouldn't be a problem, since a petition against the use of voting machines has drawn some 48,000 supporters without any trouble. You can find more information about how to support this complaint of unconstitutionality on the Homepage of Dr. Ulrich Wiesner.

RFIDiot - a python-based RFID tool

By accident, I've discovered RFIDiot, a RFID exploration library and tool written in python. There is quite a bit of overlap with what librfid tries to achieve, from a functional point of view (written in C, of course).

So on the one hand, there's a lot of functional overlap on the high-level like mifare reading/writing, ePassport reading, ... - but on the other hand, all the lower levels seem to be missing in RFIDiot. I guess that's the price you have to pay for vendor-lock-in with a proprietary serial protocol like the ACG readers.

Once I find some time again (next year, feb/march), I'd definitely like to see whether there can be some kind of integration/cooperation between RFIDiot and librfid/libmrtd.