becoming a self-proclaimed election observer

Today I will leave to the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt, as part of a CCC group that will observe the use of electronic voting machines (rather: voting computers) at the elections there.

Our main focus is to witness and collect evidence of the many shortcomings in even the current (by no means sufficient) rules and laws on the security of those devices.

As a Dutch hacker group in cooperation with the Berlin CCC has demonstrated before, the voting computers in question are by no means safe against manipulations - neither are the corresponding safety procedures and measures.

Short update

The last couple of weeks have again been so busy that I didn't find the time to update this blog. After returning from the Taipei trip, as usual, there were tons of things to be done for OpenMoko. Later I spent about one week on a business trip to Bangalore, from which I've returned monday afternoon.

Now I'm only home until thursday next week. Next friday, I'll once again depart for Taipei to speed up and coordinate OpenMoko/FIC development.

Introducing patchwork to the openmoko mailinglists

Some time ago, Jeremy Kerr wrote patchwork, a tool to semi-automatically keep track of patches submitted to mailinglists.

So far, it was mainly being used for the linuxppc and netfilter project with mixed results. I guess in both projects, in the end, nobody raelly maintained the patch status and stuff just ended up to get stale.

Now I've started an patchwork installation for OpenMoko, at least for the most common public mailinglists. So why do I think patchwork will be used more productively and receive better maintenance? Well, firstly, the number of patches on those lists is still quite small. Secondly, the number of people looking into reviewing those patches, within their primary paid-for working time, is relatively large.

I really believe that patchwork can provide an enormous benefit to a project. Let's hope we manage to use it correctly :)