Gnosis Software
Sun Apr 24 04:26:03 EDT 2011
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Privacy Issues in an Electronic Voting Machine - I wrote this paper with Arthur Keller, Joseph Hall, and Arnie Urkin. A few part of our paper are specific to the Open Voting Consortium design, but most generally describe the anonymity issues any voting system. After introducing the history and politics of a secret ballot, we analyze threats, most especially in the introduction of covert channels to a voting system.

A PC-Based Open-Source Voting Machine with an Accessible Voter-Verifiable Paper Ballot - I wrote this paper with Arthur Keller, Alan Dechert, and Karl Auerbach. This paper details design principles of the Open Voting Consortium voting system. We contrast our design with other voting technologies, with my contribution being in the analysis of the need for a paper ballot, in contrast with a paper "receipt" or mere "paper trail". I also critique Rebecca Mercuri's "ballot-under-glass" design as adding complications and security threats while actually failing to provide as much integrity assurance as OVC's physically inspectible ballot.

Open Voting Consortium Demo (Milestone 1) - On April 1, in Santa Clara, California, the OVC demonstrated a working version of our open source software for voting with paper ballots. Systems demonstrated include the touch-screen ballot GUI, a reading-impaired interface for disabled voters, a ballot reconcilliation application to produce counts and validation at the end of a voting day, and a ballot vocalization application to let voter (especially blind ones) verify the accuracy of printed ballots.

Gnosis Utilities 1.1.1 - This release adds gnosis.xml.relax to the package. Miscellaneous speedups and bugfixes to gnosis.xml.objectify. Improvements to floating point handling in gnosis.xml.pickle. Little used gnosis.trigramlib updated per needs of my personal spam filter. Minor fixes in gnosis.util.introspect.

CHARMING 2 PYTHON #B14: Numerical Python Working with the [numeric] and [numarray] packages - Numerical Python (often called NumPy) is a widely used extension library for fast operations on fixed-type arrays, of any dimensionality, in Python. Since the underlying code is well-optimized C, any speed limitations of Python's interpreter usually go away when major operations are performed in NumPy calls. As successful as NumPy has been, its developers have decided to supercede NumPy with a new module called Numarray that is mostly, but not quite entirely, compatible with NumPy. This installment looks both at the general features of NumPy, and at the specific improvements forthcoming with Numarray.

CHARMING PYTHON #B15: Review of Python IDEs - In this installment, David looks at four open source development environments for working with Python code on Unix-like operating systems. He evaluates two general-purpose editors/environments, and two Python-specific ones, and compares the merits of each.

LINUX ZONE FEATURE: Linux on PowerPC Processors Your favorite operating system isn't only for x86 - Even though most Linux users have treated Linux as an operating system for their x86 white boxes, Linux runs equally well on PowerPC machines. With the appealing range of PPC machines produced by Apple, the option of using Linux on one of these is of great value to many users.

LINUX ZONE FEATURE: Regina and NetRexx Scripting with Free Software Rexx Implementations - It is easy to get lost in the world of "little languages"--quite a few have been written to scratch some itch of a company, individual or project. Rexx is one of these languages, with a long history of use on IBM OS's, and good current implementations for Linux and other Free Software operating systsems. Moreover, David argues that Rexx occupies a useful ecological niche between the relative crudeness of shell scripting and the cumbersome formality of full systems languages. Many Linux programmers and systems administrators would benefit from adding a Rexx implementation to their collection of go-to tools.

XML MATTERS #31: SXML and SSAX Manipulating XML in the Scheme Programming Language - Previous installments have looked at XML libraries for various programming languages, and with various strengths and weaknesses. The Lisp family of languages remains popular, especially in teaching and among purists. The SSAX library for Scheme is an efficient pure-functional parser; SXML is a tree library (like DOM); and related tools SXSLT and SXPath have been created to work with these. This installment looks at the advantages of parsing in a strongly functional language, and compares SSAX with libraries for other languages.

XML MATTERS #32: The XOM Java XML API A rigorously correct tree-oriented XML model - In general outline, Elliotte Rusty Harold's [XOM] is -yet another- object-oriented XML API, somewhat in the style of DOM. However, there are a number of features that set [XOM] apart, and that Harold argues are important design elements. Chief among these is a rigorous insistence on maintaining invariants in in-memory objects so that an [XOM] instance can -always- be serialized to correct XML. As well, [XOM] aims at a greater simplicity and regularity than other Java XML APIs.

XML MATTERS #33: XML for Word Processors Open source embraces XML as native document format - In their recent versions, the three major Free Software word processing programs have all adopted XML formats as their native document format. The approach to XML taken by AbiWord, KOffice's KWord, and OpenOffice.org Writer differs somewhat between the applications-- largely reflecting the underlying development focus of each project. But all open source word processor developers have realized the advantages of XML as a document format: componentization of parsers and writers; openness and formality of format specification; applicability of XSLT and other transformation APIs.

Programming IP Sockets on Linux, Part One - TUTORIAL

Programming IP Sockets on Linux, Part Two - TUTORIAL

The GNU Text Utilities - TUTORIAL