One of the godmothers of electronic voting is Rebecca Mercuri. Her PhD dissertation introduced the concept of the voter-verified paper audit trail. I've wanted to read a copy of this thesis for a while and recently had a renewed interest in it. I paid ProQuest $37 for a PDF of Rebecca's PhD thesis, because I couldn't find it using other search tools.
Well, after looking something up in her thesis, I found that U Penn posted it. Silly me. Here it is (7.5 MB):
and type in "electronic voting", Stefan Popoveniuc's dissertation is listed with a blue little "O" next to it as an "open dissertation". I remember doing this along with danah in our quest to Creative Commons-license our dissertations. And, what d'ya know? It allows free download of Popoveniuc and other open dissertations. (although one does have to give ProQuest some information... and I didn't check if Popoveniuc's dissertation is available online too.)
I suspect mine isn't in their database because of the Creative Commons issue. We'll see!
Sequoia refers to this move in it's release as "the first public disclosure of source code from a voting systems manufacturer". Carefully parsed, that's probably correct: there have been unintentional disclosures of source code (e.g., Diebold in 2003) and I know of two other voting industry companies that have disclosed source code (VoteHere, now out of business, and Everyone Counts), but these were either not "voting systems manufacturers" or the disclosures were not available publicly. Of course, almost all of the research systems (like VoteBox and Helios) have been truly open source. Groups like OSDV and OVC have released or will soon release voting system source code under open source licenses.
I wrote a paper ages ago (2006) on the use of open and disclosed source code for voting systems and I'm surprised at how well that analysis and set of recommendations has held up (the original paper is here, an updated version is in pages 11–41 of my PhD thesis).
The purpose of my post here is to highlight one point of that paper in a bit of detail: disclosed source software licenses need to have a few specific features to be useful to potential voting system evaluators. I'll start by describing three examples of disclosed source software licenses and then talk about what I'd like to see, as a tinkerer, in these agreements.
Warning: This is a rap music blog post! It also contains frank discussion of sex, drugs and rap, hopefully from a somewhat academic perspective, so it's NSFW. If you come here for other stuff, usually, you might want to skip this post.
What is Jerkin'? I'm not exactly sure, and I hope by blogging a bit about it, I can get some input for the record from people involved in the scene. Here's what I know now, in abbreviated form. Probably the most mainstream Jerkin' song is the New Boyz' "You're a Jerk"; check their video out here. Clearly, Jerkin' is a style of music, a series of dance steps and some seriously flashy attire including bright colors, skinny jeans and skating and shit.
Anyway, on to the subject of this post: one thing that's fascinated me is the prevalence of female MCs in Jerkin'. There are a lot of them and these girls can spit furious. They easily hold their own, and then some, against the dudes. I react with enthusiasm to this just as I did with the Riot Grrrl genre (whether guys were invited to that party or not!); there's nothing like women blowing up a sausage fest scene, like hip-hop.
For the rest of this post, I'm going to throw up some samples of particularly good female Jerkin' tunes, verses and such. All of the full songs can be had over at Digital Dripped.
(Incidentally, I get the same visceral "Holy Shit!" reaction with Digital Dripped that many of us had with the original Napster. It seems just too good to be true. And it's encouraging to see tweets from Mikey where he says most of the contacts he gets from record labels are about putting tracks up and not taking them down. Anyway, on to the MCs...)
(I use a flash audio player below... so it might not show up on iPhone or Linux.)
Each of these MCs are smokin' hot. They spit over the fattest beats... definitely turn your speakers up! They do lyrical gymnastics of the highest quality. Be warned: Jerkin' lyrics talk quite frankly about sex... so, deal.
New Era -- Do It Now
This is a remarkable track by New Era. The beat is luscious; the hook is addictively clever and danceable and the verses are top-notch. The subject is pretty novel: she's talking about how much head she gets. She even goes as far as to shout out a list of guys that have done the deed for her. This is flipping the sexual energy around from typical hip-hop; Jerkin' itself can be highly sexual, but this is a woman boasting about her conquests. Superb.
"I get more mouth than a red letter"
New Era -- Dumb Bitch
It's hard for me to tell (living in Jersey and all, and being old and shit) but this appears to be a diss response track to a diss of New Era for boasting about liking to give head in the last track (or some other track). She makes the case that she's not ashamed of her oral sex skills and does so in a scathing manner.
"Cuz, um, if you ain't suckin' dick,
he got a side bitch
And, I can bet money on that one
me and my hubby get it poppin' like a cap gun"
Lala ft. Giddy -- Nymphomaniac
This track is almost too dirty to write about! It's a fast-paced romp using a lot of electric sounds and deep tonal bass. LaLa kills the first verse and Giddy ends it will an equally accomplished lyrical flourish. This is a simple but impressive and sonically large track.
"I'm a nymphomaniac, looking for a brainiac
to teach me a lesson, yup, simple as that.
I'm a nymphomaniac, looking for a brainiac
to show me how to work it, then run it back."
Yummy S Dot -- Get Buck (Remix)
Girls can be aggressive too, yo. This song is about not stepping down at the club when another girl is straight tripping out. Yummy S Dot is not adverse to throwing down... and her verses on this track emphasize her toughness over a heavy bass and electronic synth background.
"Bitch back that, before that ass gets slapped
'cause you hear 'pop! pop!' when the burner 'clap claps'!
Ho, I'm serious, you are delirious
If you think your man ain't know me, are you furious?"
Mz. E Baby -- So Fresh (ft. C-Coop)
This songs is purely copacetic... Mz. E Baby is a lyricist unparalleled in Jerkin', and Jay Star and New Era are about as close to her skills as it comes. This is a heavy hitting, musically minimal and lyrically insane track. E Baby shreds and shreds and just when you think she's killed it enough, the beat drops out and she's coming back 10 times harder.
"What I do, it gotta be right
When I do it, it gotta be tight
More icy than Gucci Mane
???
So Fresh, So Clean
From my head to my toes, I'm covered with bling
I'm hot, you not
now everybody run with me."
Fe Raw -- Fill It Up Snip
Then there's Fe Raw, another remarkable jerkin' female. Very laid-back flow that isn't the best in the verses but bad ass hooks. She has a bunch of other great tracks including "Boy, You Nasty" which is really a fun track.
"'Cuz I'm a bad bitch, badder than you'll ever fuck with
(juice?) in my cup, got me really fucked up
married to the mob, so I'm like, so what
(meet?) in the flow, fill it up"
Jayy Starr -- Raw Bitch
Jayy Star, like New Era and Mz. E Baby is one of my favorites. She is in the stratosphere in terms of lyrical quality. She claims she is a "raw bitch": She raps about how bad ass she is at rapping, how much money she makes and all the guys she can get. And she does this with one superb verse after another.
"Lil' daddy in my ear tryin' to holla
but I only speak money, an he ain't talkin' dollars"
"I swear I'm the realist
Starr spits sick more ill than the illest
dope like crack dealahs,
I'm not the best, what you talking 'bout, Wilis?"
"Stacks on deck, jewels on my neck
(bury?) incorrect, I get respect
cook them checks, goons on deck,
I'm so sex, jerkin', yes
I'm a raw bitch, raw bitch"
Asia Lynn -- Tip Toe
Finally, Asia Lynn throws down this track... and it sounds like the first verse is actually someone else rapping, but I can't figure out who. This is a minimal track and highlights Asia's lyrical style. She is obviously having a good time... in the club, smoking blunts, shaking her ass, making the other girls jealous.
"Tip Toe, when I step in the club
I'm a bad bitch, so these niggas show me love
These bitches steady hating, they some pigeons, I'm a dove
When they see Asia Lynn, it's alright, they know what's up"
Last Summer, I wanted to slap a Creative Commons license on my dissertation. A good friend, Ping, had used another license (GFDL) by simply changing the copyright page and including the legal terms of the license in an appendix. So, I slapped a note on my copyright page and then included the full terms of CC's Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License in Appendix F.
Then I forgot about it... as the last bits of my thesis fell into place and some other things fell out of place.
About a week before I wanted to file, I was contacted by staff at Berkeley and told that my copyright page wasn't up to snuff. I figured that they had me nailed as some sort of rabble-rouser and that this could quickly blow up into a legal licensing mess. I was concerned that I didn't want to delay filing my thesis, but I also knew that I was probably the best person to fight this particular fight. Sigh. However, when I talked to the Berkeley staffer, it was clear that they simply expected the copyright page to look a specific way. Mine didn't look right. The rub was this: I couldn't make my copyright page "conform" without using the phrase "All Rights Reserved". Sigh.
We settled, via a formal appeal to the Graduate Division Dean, on a simple solution that you can see in my thesis: the copyright page says "Some Rights Reserved" and there is a reference to the full legal license in Appendix F. Hurray!
However, it became clear that other students might want to do this too. When danah went to file her dissertation, even though she followed the same scheme as me, the staff hadn't heard of the above exception. With a few mad text messages back and forth, I was able to give danah the name of the staffer I had worked with. This blessed staffer cleared everything up for danah. After that, hers was (probably) the second Berkeley PhD dissertation filed under a CC license. (I'd love to know of others!)
I decided to write a letter to the Graduate Division Dean asking his help to ensure that in the future using CC licenses wasn't difficult.
Two recent Berkeley students to file their dissertations using a Creative Commons license are Joseph Lorenzo Hall and danah boyd. Hall navigated through much bureaucratic red tape, but found that most of his difficulty came from simple formatting issues, not any ideological disagreement by the univerisyt [sic]. Another School of Information graduate, danah boyd, also filed her dissertation under Creative Commons shortly thereafter.
On Jan. 28, the Dean of the Graduate Division committed to make Creative Commons licensing available to future students. All students interested in contributing to the effort to make education more affordable and accessible should consider using Creative Commons instead of traditional copyright.
A couple quibbles: Dean Szeri didn't "commit" to making CC licenses available. In essence the exception I sought to use a CC license was the key event that will allow others to do this in the future. In his response to my letter, Dean Szeri said that my letter was timely because his staff was reviewing this and other options. As I outlined in my letter, what I would like to see happen is that students know that CC licensing is an option and know how to apply this kind of license in an informed way that doesn't run afoul of any formatting rules, let alone legal restrictions.
Also, CC uses copyright to do what it does... so maybe that last sentence would have been better as "...should consider using Creative Commons licenses instead of blindly reserving all rights."
Upgrading the firmware in an unlocked, jailbroken iPhone is not easy and definitely nerve-racking.
Here's what I just had to do to upgrade from 2.2 to 2.2.1:
Wrote down all the Cydia apps I had installed. (they're blasted out of existence each time you upgrade)
Allowed iTunes to update my phone to 2.2.1. Also made a copy of the 2.2.1 ipsw (firmware file).
Installed the backwards-downgrade of the USB kernel extensions for Mac OS 10.5.5 so that the iPhone's DFU mode (firmware update mode) isn't broken. Rebooted. (see "Fixing DFU Mode on 10.5.6" here)
Used QuickPwn to do whatever it does to the firmware, etc. Also, used quickpwn to get the bastard into DFU mode.*
Power it off and back on again.
Then let iTunes restore from freakin' backup and re-sync. (takes a long time)
Re-install all the Cydia apps, one-by-one, from the list made above.
Restore the 10.5.6 USB kernel extensions and reboot so that you get 10.5.6 USB back. (Note: my MacBook Pro would not go to sleep with the old USB code; it would write its memory to disk for a few seconds and then immediately wake. Reinstalling the 10.5.6 USB code fixed that.)
If you've purchased Snapture (a phone app), you'll probably have to download SBSettings from the iPhone and reset the user directory permissions on your phone (more here).
You should change the passwords on the root and mobile users from the defaults of alpine and dottie. Recall that passwd mobile will change the password for the user mobile. You'll also have to update any stored SSH keys on machines your iphone interacts with.
If you've setup Cycorder to save videos to a directory in your Air Sharing directory tree (e.g., a la this post), you'll have to re-establish that symbolic link. (Tip: make sure the target directory exits and is chowned to mobile:mobile.)
* BTW, getting into DFU mode can be tricky for some dorky reason... seems that you have to do the following: 1) plug the iphone into your computer via USB, 2) turn the iphone off, 3) hold down the power and home keys on the iphone for exactly 10 seconds, 4) release the power key but continue to hold the home key for 10 more seconds. If you fuck this up, you'll just be in regular recovery mode and not DFU mode and you'll be in for a world of hurt. In that case, you'll probably want to QuickPwn again.
If you're a complete idiot like me, you read the news at the iPhone Dev Team blog and was excited that you could upgrade your 2G iPhone to the new 2.2 firmware with no extra tricks... and you just did it.
If you're also an idiot, you probably did not "unhide" applications that you had previously hidden using Cydia's BossPrefs, Poof or Categories. Also, you probably hid BossPrefs and Cydia, which means you couldn't "unhide" jack squat nor install something like Poof which would allow you to do the same thing.
Issue #2: iPhone backup works fine. But now you only have a few icons. Cydia is missing. What can you do where did all your icons go?
First, to address issue #2, missing icons. This occurs because you had installed categories and moved a bunch of files into folders. When you restore, your springboard plist will be restore and that contains a bunch of hidden icons. Here are your options
1) Prevent this situation by unhiding icons and/or deleting your folders before you do yoru final backup before you upgrade
2) After your jailbreak ends, before you restore your backup, install some things that will help you such as: openssh, poof, bossprefs (any of these you did not have installed before would be great). Here is a prioritized list of options:
a) Install Poof if BossPrefs was hidden install BossPrefs if Poof was hidden. Either of these can completely unhide all your apps. If both were used and hidden then move to B.
b) If settings is available, run that. Enable restrictions, disable restrictions. All your apps will be visible. If settings was hidden, move to C.
c) SSH into the iPhone with scp or ssh. If you don’t know how, use this guide. Navigate yourself over to /var/mobile/Library/Preferences and delete com.apple.springboard.plist. Respring your iPhone by typing “killall SpringBoard” into SSH or, if you don’t know how to do that, just reboot. All your hidden apps will be visible.
So, you probably didn't realize that you could go into "Settings" -> "General" -> "Restrictions" and simply turn on and then off Restrictions... which unhides all apps.
You probably dinked around with past customized firmwares for a few hours, wasting your precious time. Don't do that again.
Yesterday, I filed my dissertation and got my sucker (Berkeley gives you a tasty See's Cafe Latte hard candy sucker when you graduate).
My dissertation is about a very poignant topic: policy mechanisms for making electronic voting systems more transparent. After refining what we mean when we talk about transparency, I examine open source, procurement contracts and auditing voting systems and show that each of these hold real promise for peeling back the layers of opacity in which we now find our voting systems enshrouded.
If you'd like to read it, here is a link and the abstract:
Policy Mechanisms for Increasing Transparency in Electronic Voting
In the early years of the American republic, only white male landowners could vote, and
then typically by expressing their preferences in a public setting, for all to witness. Our
electoral system has changed drastically since that time; now almost all Americans cast
votes with the assistance of computerized equipment. While much good stems from the use
of computerized equipment in elections—notably increased efficiency, enfranchisement and
flexibility—unintended consequences of this mechanization have left us with complicated,
insecure and opaque voting systems.
My PhD thesis focuses on the issue of transparency in evoting;
that is, what public policy
mechanisms can serve to make our voting systems less opaque? After exploring what we
mean by “electoral transparency”, I examine the question of evoting
transparency on three
fronts. I analyze the role of disclosed and open source software in election systems and
conclude that, while fully disclosed source code is a valid goal, limited disclosure to experts
serves many of the same goals in the shortterm
while preserving vendor trade secrecy. I
investigate how contractual provisions between local election jurisdictions and voting system
vendors serve to frustrate transparency and find that election officials need to be more
careful in these negotiations. Finally, I turn to the question of auditing black box elections
systems; that is, since we cannot know how these systems work in the fulldisclosure
(“white
box”) case, possibly because of contractual provisions that limit investigation, what methods
and procedures can we use for “checking the math” behind our elections?
A group of wild and crazy guys -- Eric Rescorla, Stefan Savage, Hovav Schacham and Terence Spies -- spotted a legal notice in a paper towel dispenser at UC Santa Barbara.
It said:
"This dispenser is subject to restrictions on sale, modification, filling and use, and may be used only to dispense the trademark-bearing products identified on its exterior. Georgia-Pacific Corporation strictly prohibits unauthorized sale, modification, filling or use of this dispenser, and will enforce its rights under United States and foreign laws."
For their CRYPTO rump session, they created a hilarious Lessig-esque presentation centered around DRM (dryness rights management).
Via Mikey of 
Then there's 
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