Slactivist Moves

Slactivist moved to TypePad. His new URL is http://slacktivist.typepad.com/

I don't mention bookmark changes much, but I mention this because Slactivist is one of my favorite blogs, and I've been meaning to plug it for a while. It's not updated much, and the old version was about as simple as you can get (check out that 1993 retro design). But Fred Clark's writing is great and very thoughtful. He's a progressive Christian, a voice I don't hear much from in my day-to-day life. From that perspective, he provides excellent analysis of Bush's Christian references that I find very interesting.

— September 23, 2003

Diebold Security Flaws -- unbelievable

Salon: An open invitation to election fraud.

I haven't been following the electronic voting controversy aside from "voter-verified good, no audit trail bad". This Salon interview with Bev Harris blows the doors right off this scandal. Harris uncovered internal memos that show that Diebold knew about security flaws two years ago and didn't fix them. Most unbelievable is that Diebold's centralized vote database, GEMS, is easily hackable over the internet! (What do you expect: it stores the votes in a Microsoft Access file.) And since GEMS counts optical scan ballots as well as Diebold touch screen computer ballots, not even voter-verified ballots are safe (though you can do a hand recount with optical scan).

These people need to be stopped.

— September 23, 2003