Month: November 2005

Categories
e-democ / e-gov

Post Conference thoughts: Mobiles are where it’s at

Having had a few days to chew on last week's conferences the theme inclusion or its evil cousin the digital divide keeps bubbling up in nearly every presentation.

Those of us in this webby e-democracy aware world are getting a little better at realising that we're unusually connected and ahead of the curve. So presenters are looking over their shoulders – looking at those barely or not connected. We realise how empowering much of the Internet can be and we want everyone to be invited to the party, whether out of altruism or because it means more potential customers!

Inclusiveness is difficult to argue against, but we do need to remember that some people just don't want to use the Internet. But perhaps they want to use a phone? Tom Hume's presentation at d.construct [PDF] re-aligned my thinking when he reminded us just how pervasive mobile phones are by starting his presentation with:

“There are twice as many mobile phones, than there are internet users of any kind. There are three times as many mobile phones than there are personal computers. There are more mobile phones than credit cards, more mobile phones than automobiles, more mobile phones than TV sets, and more mobile phones than fixed/wireline phones… 30% of the global population carries a mobile phone… Over 30 countries have achieved over 100% cellphone penetration rates…”

Many of us are ignoring the mobile medium – but Tom reminded us that the massive lack of standardisation in software and form factor along with the necessary role of the network operators does make developing for phones extremely tricky. Yet there's a huge market there – SMS gateways ahoy!

So whilst mobiles are getting people connected to a network of sorts, until we see improved standardisation we're going to need to be very creative in providing simple usable, inclusive services through mobile phones.

One e-voting nugget, from e-democracy '05, was Stephen Coleman's hilarious and spot-on comment that to see improved turnout government money would be better spent putting kettles and buns in polling stations rather than lining technology vendor's pockets!

Comments from the previous version of this blog:

Kettles or mobiles?

Hi Jason,
I would fund the kettles. Did you know kettles have a remarkable level of penetration in UK households – more even than mobile phones.

People bang on and on about mobiles for e-democracy access, but if you are motivated anough to want to interact somehow with government, you almost certainly can access a computer somewhere (eg a library).

What on earth do people think users will actually do with their mobiles? How much deliberation or debate can you get on a mobile phone screen? I think the ‘mobiles as solution to access’ idea is overstated.
17:16:01 GMT 17-11-2005 Lee Bryant

Overstated?

I don’t know how far some are going with mobile rhetoric but I don’t see massive textual deliberation through phones.

But I do see lots of simple services being deliverable via SMS and/or WAP which aren’t now.

Within the context of the conferences I attended last week mobiles just weren’t on the agenda at all – it was so web-browser centric that I thought discussing mobiles was a useful reality check.

Hurrah for the kettles I say!
12:34:30 GMT 19-11-2005 Jason Kitcat

Democracy and SMS

Jason: +1

Why don’t my utility providers text me when a bill goes overdue? It’s cheaper for them than sending stamps, and quicker. Why can’t I report in electricity meter readings over text? Why can I get my bank balance whenever I want? Or find out when the bins in my street will be emptied? Or report vandalism to the council? Get alerts of local building plans which affect me? And so on.

There are a million beautifully mundane uses for even the most basic connectivity that SMS provides. I’m not sure I’d be in favour of voting-by-text if it were possible… but it looks to me like participation in a democratic society involves way more than just popping into a polling centre every 4 years to scrawl your X.
19:27:46 GMT 21-11-2005 Tom Hume

Tom – spot on!

I agree absolutely…

Out of interest LloydsTSB do offer a weekly balance SMS which is fairly useful when out of reach of the Internet banking. But as you point out, there are so many useful, simple services that could be run through SMS.

The one I love is from somewhere in Scandinavia (Sweden or Denmark I think). Every year you get an SMS saying how much income tax the gov believes you owe. If it looks totally wrong then you can log on, visit the tax office etc and sort it out before the deadline is too close. Most of us know roughly how much tax we should pay but in the UK we have to pro-actively go onto the Inland Revenue site to get any sort of calculations done.

Tom – there’s loads of work for you Future Platforms lot there if only people could see it!
22:37:27 GMT 22-11-2005 Jason Kitcat

Categories
voting

Think e-voting is easy? Then read this

The Usable Security blog from UC Berkeley has posted the first part of it's complete examinations of optical scan and DRE systems from the big 4 e-voting vendors Diebold, ES & S, Sequoia, and Hart Intercivic.

First up is Diebold. Reading the details of how one votes and the problems they've identified I don't know how anyone can possibly get it all right and cast an accurate ballot.

Particularly scary is how the optical scanner gives you no inkling if your individual votes have been counted correctly. The complexity of the DRE's interface is daunting.

A very useful read for the e-voting interested.

Categories
current affairs

Selective ‘airport style’ security on the rail network won’t work

It's not much of a surprise that Transport Secretary Alistair Darling has announced that x-ray screening can't be implemented across the rail network. Well of course not, there are so many entry points to the rail network that the cost of the machines and staff would be absurd, never mind that they could never cope with rush-hour numbers.

Instead of just focussing on other measures, such as better trained police and human intelligence agents (though they're doing a bit of that), they're going to be piloting x-ray and body scanner machines on the Heathrow Express line. A complete waste of time and money, the usual cheap politics of the ignorant I'm afraid.

  • This is a classic case of fighting the last war we lost. I'd expect the next attack to be a car or truck-based bomb and not to be train or tube-based considering the excessive police presence on the networks now.

  • By so publicly announcing the location of where these machines will be it's certain that no serious terrorist is going to actually use that rail line or any others that have scanners installed in the future.

  • If airports are anything to go by then the people staffing these machines will be underpaid and bored right out of their brains. Due to passenger numbers they'll have to pick only some people, which due to their low training and motivation will probably the 'usual suspects' if the scanning staff do any profiling at all.

  • Of course this makes it look like 'something is being done' by the politicians (and I'm not saying something shouldn't be done) but it's just using technology to cover the hand waving. The public know about airport screening so it sort of sounds good, sounds reassuring etc. But in reality this, if anything, makes us more insecure by diverting resources and attention away from more useful security measures like: Making it harder to produce high explosives, effectively tracking terrorist networks, interfering with their funding (if you think we're doing well on that count read this damning report ) and so on.

The UK isn't the only place doing this kind of silly security measure for public reassurance, the US are masters at it too… the problem is a lack of proper security understanding in many segments of the non-security service government and a lack of criticism on these matters from the media because, well we've all got to be seen to want the terrorists stopped. We do, which is why it's important we point out the stupid ideas when they arise.

Fun bonus link, by the ever excellent John Lettice, showing why two biometrics are not always better than one

Categories
voting

Zut! e-voting problems in Quebec

Those who know me may not realise that I’m actually half French-Canadian, but I am, proudly so. I don’t sound it due to years of English education, though fat good that does me – every time I’ve been abroad recently people have commented that, on the basis of our english-speaking accents, I must be American and my Polish wife must be English sigh.

I digress. The news is that on Sunday 6th November the Quebecois voted in municipal elections for councillors and mayors. In many areas this was done with electronic voting kiosks within polling stations (there was no remote e-voting). DRE and optical scan machines were used, details of all the systems used can be found in this forum post.

Paper Vote Canada has a summary of some Canadian press coverage [French]. Essentially the reports argue that very little has been put in place to ensure the security of the vote and even the president of one of the suppliers is quoted as saying, I translate, “There isn’t really a way to prove to a voter that their vote was stored exactly as they wanted. One needs blind faith in the integrity of the local election officials.”

Two days after the election, the province’s Chief Electoral Officer is reported as saying that the computer glitches were due to a network crash and a few defective machines. As a result the official states that electronic balloting may not best suited for bigger cities and so rules out e-voting from provincial elections or referenda for the near future. CBC report

Last Friday a leading Montreal politican (who lost his race to become mayor) called for the election results to be cancelled due to the technical problems [French] This was after results, supposed to be ready in minutes, took hours to appear but it soon emerged 45,000 votes had been counted twice, a few days later the results changed again in three districts, a new winner being named in one race. Details

The elections had very low turnout, I’ve seen figures as low as 35% mentioned. Canada’s paper-based electoral system is excellent. There seems to be no good case for the expense and risk of introducing e-voting in Canada. The current system is simple, note that they also seem to lack any certification process for these new systems. I hope that the current doubts over the recent election results can be cleared up – for everyone’s benefit – and that they then leave this stupid machines alone. The damage to turnout from uncertain results is far worse than any benefits e-voting could bring.

More Links
French site recul-democratique.org has a bit more on the Quebec situation [French]

The English-speaking Montreal Gazette has more, but for subscribers only, and I didn’t have time to get in but the stories are here

Categories
notes from JK

Conference craze

What a week. Wednesday saw me at the excellent e-democracy 05 where all the great and good of the e-democracy mingled. Thursday was the launch of Brighton & Hove's own search engine p2b.net at lunch time then the Brighton web awards in the evening. Today I'm helping out at the d.Construct conference where there's loads of web 2.0 goodness being discussed. More on all these events when I catch a moment.

Categories
notes from JK

Workshop: Free wifi plus NMA discount

Positive feedback is rolling in for my January workshop, Managing Web Projects, everyone I talk to about it either wants to come themselves or knows a bunch of people who would love to come. I'm looking forward to some quality discussion and ideas-sharing on professionally delivering web projects.

In the meantime some more goodies to tempt fence-sitters into registering. I've confirmed that there will be free wifi across the whole venue for the entire day.

Also the lovely people at New Media Age are giving our workshop delegates a 31% discount on a 1-year subscription.

To sign up, see more information or just ogle the deals our partners are offering delegates, visit http://www.kitcat-workshops.com

Categories
e-democ / e-gov

Comprehensive NYC post-‘open source’ campaign analysis

Micah Sifry, eCampaign Director has posted an excellent analysis of the Rasiej for Public Advocate campaign. Rasiej was running to be the Public Advocate (sort of deputy mayor) for New York City. His campaign was full of great new ideas including free wifi across the city. He had blogs, a Google Maps based pot-hole tracker to show what can be done with the Internet and encourage small online donations instead of currying big name support.

Unfortunately he only polled 5.17% coming in 4th out of 6 candidates for the Democratic primary – and that was that.

There's loads of good e-democracy stuff in the article which I won't bother repeating but of note for all, not just e-democracy folk, is their bitter disappointment with how little online advertising delivered for them.

I come away from reading the analysis feeling there's lots of positive things to take from more open, online campaigns but you can't forget the meat and potatoes of politics – people and particularly big name support (such as ex-presidents, mayors etc).

Go read!

Categories
technology

The Spam that goes beep in the night: Stopping SMS Spam

The other night my wife's mobile beeped and vibrated as two SMS text messages barged into her phone at 4am. We were both delighted seeing as the phone was on the bedside table, waking us both. The next morning she checked and saw two lovely spam messages.

Hence the past hour or so spent trying to stop it from happening again. We're both with T-Mobile and they're call centre staff are usually quite helpful so I gave them ring. After faffing through the menus (joy) I got through to a human who told me one thing several times “There's nothing we can do about spam.” Right, thanks buddy.

Phone Scream

He was nice and friendly as he said it. But still he could have said “Have you tried registering with x” or “If the spam persists report it to our unsolicited messages team” or “Your phone has a feature to block certain numbers” or even “If you pay us we can block it.” But no, nothing, zip, nada. Not interested.

So, as always, I went online and started by searching all of the barely usable T-Mobile UK site for 'spam' or 'unsolicited' which resulted in… nothing. With lots of fiddling, opening the site in Firefox and Safari eventually I found “Unfortunately, it's not yet possible to bar incoming text messages.” Great.

So after lots of Googling the best I can do, it would seem, is register our numbers with the Telephone Preference Service which may do the job. Let's face it, the network operators profit from every SMS message sent, so why stop the little money makers?

The information I've found has been sketchy and contradictory but I believe there is EU legislation pending to try and cut down on SMS spam. It's dependent on how each country implements it though… I think we're yet to see the UK version. I hope in the future phones will offer filters for this kinds of thing while the spammers themselves get thwacked by the authorities. Hopefully, maybe?

I'll let you know if we get less SMS spam too…

The Others

In the interests of completeness I then had to go and check out the other phone networks. So in descending order of patheticness here's my findings:

Vodafone have a VSPAM service which seems fairly pro-active. Any message sent to the VSPAM service is going to be blocked, they imply. If an 090 number is in the spam they also pass the spam to the appropriate regulator.
http://online.vodafone.co.uk/dispatch/Portal/appmanager/vodafone/wrp?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=Page_BOS_MainContent&pageID=AV_0054

Orange aren't exactly spectacular in their help but they do offer useful tips and advice online. They also implicity do something about spam as they encourage users to forward spam messages to a special short code number. Still they don't do Blackberries so not much good for me.
http://www.orange.co.uk/about/contact/spam/

I finally cracked O2's dreadful site with an advanced Google search which showed one page just telling people to report messages to the premium number regulator ICSTIS. Not helpful or proactive at all. http://www.o2.co.uk/help/spam_advice/0,,500,00.html

I could find nothing at all about spam from 3.

SMS Spam Links

43% of text messages in the US are now spam according to Wireless Services Corporation.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=60404039

Text spam complaints skyrocket in South Korea.
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000520024878/

Children burned by SMS Spam on the CBBC Newsround site.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/chat/your_comments/newsid_2450000/2450311.stm

Legal moves to stop SMS spam around the world…
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,61226,00.html

Excellent overall guide to SMS Spam.
http://www.wiredsafety.org/gb/law/spam/sms_spam.html

Categories
e-democ / e-gov

A Cabinet Office Minister Blogs

A big up to William Heath, Chairman of Kable for getting Cabinet Office Minister Jim Murphy blogging on the excellent Ideal Government blog.

The first ministerial post is online here.

While the post is about e-government strategy, I see this as an important step in e-democracy. Ideal Government is a blog of people who care about e-government, they're an interested party. The minister has seen it to be worth his while to engage with the group online… a further validation of using online tools in the grey consultative areas of policy development.