On friday, I went to see an acupuncturist in Fremont for a smoking cessation treatment. The treatment started off basically like your standard acupuncture consultation: fille out forms, answer questions, and then get an initial diagnosis.
Howevever, this time, I was told to into a room where the acupuncturist had a laptop. Attached to the laptop was a device that had 2 leads: one going to a blunt metal tube about the size of a cow pellet, and another leading to a pokey needle looking thing.
The doc then proceeded to have me hold th metal tube in one hand and then prod me in the other hand with the pokey stick. As she did this, various readouts and numbers came up on the screen highlighting areas of qi flow in a digital body.
I wasn't able to find the Digi Meridian model that she was specifically using, but apparently there are several similar products out there.
I felt at one very curious, somewhat old-fasioned enthralled by the novelty, and kind of suspect of snake oil.
The device reported flare ups in my intestinal channels predominantly. According to the acupuncturist, the device was very sensitive to the conditions that were occuring at that moment. Hence, while I don't (think I)have any particular issues with my intenstinal channels, it may have been that it was off due to the fact that I had not eaten anything substantial and was very hungry.
After a little more skeptisim, she proceeded to manually feel my meridians and tell me a list of symptoms I was having which I did not inform her of. Pretty good detective work.
End analysis: I have blocks in my liver and heart channels (both of which is true).
While much of my life is rooted in some form or another of a shamanic tradition, the boundaries between technology and the various grades of qi/prana is interesting. I think most of the approaches in the newage/psi circles however: kirlian photography, infrared/uv readings, muscular electroresistance, etc. I'd be interested in the principles, and whether anyone has had any luck with qi measuring devices.
This is for any interested parties of the OPG vs Diebold hearing that
was held this morning.
A brief background of the case: OPG (and the suborganization California
Community Colo Project) acts as colo to a variety of sites, including partially
sf.indymedia.org as well as evil-wire.org. Sites host leaked internal diebold
memos annotating serious voting bugs amongst serious concerns of
institutionalized vote fraud. Diebold sends OPG cease and desist letters under
DMCA provisions. OPG sues back for declarative judgement that the cease
and desist letters are inpermissible under fair use.
I showed up in the San Jose Federal Court today as partly an interested
citizen, and partly one of OPG's "clients" who as asked to take down the
material in question from the evil-wire.org servers. The court building itself
was a creepy parody of Neal Stephenson's Fedworld- filled with metal
detectors, overly sensitive security guards, and with more scary suits than
unixbeards in a colo. (I will give however, that a lot of the hottie lawyer
ppl can be fantastic eye candy while waiting for the boring parts to finish...
And oh the possibilites of sexual tension between seemingly disparate intellectual views only to find out that love conquers all...)
The audience had a small number of reporters and digital civil liberties
types waiting for the hearing.
The first 3 hearings in the court seemed to be of various corporate
infighting. Judge Jeremy Fogel of the Northen California
Federal Court distric rushed the cases along, as he announced
he wanted to devote as much time as possible to OPG vs Diebold case.
When the case was called up, a horde of lawyers (I guess around 6, plus a CTO)
representing Diebold went up to the stand, countered by Cindy Cohn and Wendy
Seltzer representing OPG.
For better or worse, Judge Fogel appeared to be one of the key behind
the scene players in the Silicon Valley- he was obviously a weathered veteran
of endless rounds of patent, expression, and trade disputes in the endless circus
that technology and law bring.
Judge Fogel opened up with statements about how the leaked
Diebold memos were of material of great public interest. For a country that is
now rife with election fraud and right wing court packing, Fogel's opening
statements were remarkably lucid about how much was at stake about electoral
democracy. I wonder how different the remarks would have been were this
not Northern California the case was heard in.
Fogel proceeded to grill the Diebold Representatives.
On a side note, Diebold's lead counsel in this case is Robert A. Mittelstaedt of Jonesday.
While I did not know this at the time he refused to give me his card after
the hearing (and thus preventing my voicing distaste [I gleamed the contact
info from a reporter if anyone is interested]), Mittlestaet is also the lead
counsel for ChevronTexaco in a number of cases, including Bowoto vs ChevronTexaco-
a case in which Chevron is under fire for the Parabe incident in Nigera where massive
human rights violations and the deaths of activists occured.
Diebold's counsel proceeded on the following no brainer claims:
Fogel asked Diebold counsel whether any of the memos can be excerpted for publishing
for purposes of critique, to which Diebold replied "no".
Fogel flipped the question to the counsel - whether any of the memos were
excerptable for publishing, and possibly remove parts of the memo, to which OPG
replied "no".
Fogel then grilled OPG, whose counsel came up with the following response:
Fogel has set aside a good chunk of time for the ruling. IANAL, however, if the
ruling falls on Diebold's side, then it seems the bar of difficulty for whistleblowers
getting their story out will be raised at least in above ground channels.
If the ruling falls on the OPG side, then almost more interesting to me from a legal
perspective is the inevtiable dispute that will come after this ruling. That is to say,
free speech vs a context of trade secrets. I cannot think of any cases where this
has been brought up before in such a strong light in the States in the pre-internet era.
The Bunner case is one of consumer rights, whereas a ruling on this could truly
decide just how commerce-uber-alles the U.S. government is. An interesting battle
as the lives of American citizens fall more and more into monopolistic commercial
powers.
On november 17th, the Online Policy Group will be involved in a legal action to cease the Diebold cease and desists against Indymedia, and the upstream provider the California Community Colo Project (where this machine is hosted). In the meantime, I've been requested to remove the diebold memos from this server until a ruling is granted next week.
On the topic of voting, I've gotten a number of responses on preferential voting. The first is the general complaint on Instant Runoff Voting. Mako correctly points out that IRV is really the weakest form of preferential voting there is, and a push for a voting system should be something more a long the lines of a condorcet counting method.
Also, Paul Harrison (developer of the RSPP protocol in linked to in an earlier post) writes an interesting perspective:
Here in Australia, we have preferential voting. In fact we have compulsory preferential voting -- you get a big fine if you don't vote.
Result: we still have the aussie equivalent of republicans in power, BUT both our "republicans" and "democrats" are way left of yours, and minor parties hold the balance of power in the senate and effectively stop the worst stuff getting through.
I would love to hear more about people's experiences with alternative tallies... And more to the point, any effective cooperative and consensus building tools that they may have used in their personal lives.
To implement a useable piece of voting software, you need security. Gnu.free is now defunct, but attempted to implement voting software on a government wide scale. My goals would be a litte less ambitious, as the problems free elections in governments seems to be a systemic cultural problem more than anything else. I think in small groups, cultural agreement simplifies trust models- but in a scenario with millions of people all of it goes out the window.
So perhaps the first place to start is to define a standard of what an internet voting system should minimally include security wise. The conditions for democratic voting are generally agreed upon as:
- Individuals are anonymous, ideally to the end tallyer
- the voting system needs to be auditable
- the voting system CANNOT issue verifiable receipts of an individual vote, otherwise it introduces the ability for a person to buy a vote
- the votes themselves should not be interceptable: while there is arguement whether it is good or bad to be able to forecast running elections, the client and the server connection should be secure.
- only legitimate partcipants can vote a set number of times
etc etc. As far as I am aware, there are no cryptographic standards in place for a non-governmental voting system....