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BSD Operating Systems

BSD And Politics 129

Posted by emmett from the just-another-corporate-interest dept.
qbasicprogrammer writes: "At Daily Daemon News, Josh Pennell says the Reform Party's National Primary Online Election was constantly under attack during the 72-hour election window, however IOActive (the Reform Party's hosting service)'s OpenBSD server kept the kiddies and crackers away. According to the reader comments, Ralph Nader is using BSD/OS, as is the Libertarian Party Web site. It's nice to see political parties believe in freedom of software."
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BSD And Politics More

BSD And Politics

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  • Pitchfork Pat rises again. In spite of their choice of server, this 3rd party's convention looked more like community theater than political theater.

    Open-source is nice - closed nominating process is not. Bouncers turned away anyone who didn't support Pat "Ruler of the Pit" Buchanan.

    Read the rest in friday's news update:
    www.ridiculopathy [ridiculopathy.com]

  • Sorry, that's crap. I'm no fan of Bill Gates (to put it very mildly) but this is not mathematically possible. Let's say Bill is worth $80 billion -- the most recent figures I've been able to find range from $70 to $90 billion, but we're just ballparking here. $80 billion divided by 120 million is $666 (scary!). Does Nader seriously believe that 120 million of us (nearly half the population!) have net worths of less than 700 bucks? Most of us own more than that in gadgets and CDs, not even considering items like cars and houses.

    There are two possibilities here, neither of which is very good.

    1. Nader is lying.

    2. Nader can't do simple arithmetic

    Neither says much for his desirability as a president.
    --
    WordSocket Voice BBS Software

  • As much as I hate to agree with this by and large I have to.

    3 reasons:

    1. I grew up in rural Maine. I knew a LOT of people who deliberately worked the welfare system. It wasn't that they were stupid, it was that they preferred to NOT work as much as they could. I hung out with these people, I dated these people. This exists.

    2. (really another version of 1) -- My mother owns her own business. People have claimed to have applied for work there on their welfare forms when they had not (welfare calls and checks up sometimes) Also -- people would come in when she was not hiring and "apply" for a job to fulfill the welfare rules.

    3. 2 years ago, after I quit a career in the theatre (being a very skilled seamstress pays LOTS less than a somewhat skilled web developer -- go figure)I spent a while QUITE poor, and then a while in a HORRIBLE job for health insurance while I got skills that actually paid. It helps that I like it, but nevertheless, it was a bit of a journey from needles to computers.

    Where am I going with this -- welfare can be a very helpful hand up for people who need it (I never used it, thank you) but is VERY abused. People can learn the skills necessary to get out of poverty.
  • Ralp Nader isn't a member of the Green Party. Betcha didn't know that fact. They nominated him for President because he has good name recognition. And the fact that he killed the one technologically advanced car produced in Detroit in the '60s.

    It's no wonder he's "distancing" himself from the Greens' watermelon platform. (watermelon=green on the outside, red on the inside).

  • In my view it dosn't matter what is in place or how noble or enlightend or great it is... It's been in place for about 40 years and it hasn't worked. At some point you have to say "Enough" and try again.

    Welfare was a great idea but it was made to save the United States during the depression. It did the job. Maybe not elegently but it worked.

    The problem is this quickfix was extended for decades. It should have NEVER run this long. It stopped working in the 1960s and thats becouse it was in place far to long by that time...

    It worked.. it worked well.. It it's not a long term solution.

    The education system was ment to be the long term solution. However from my point of view it seems many school adminstraters learnned they get more money when the schools don't teach than when they do. Rewarded by falure.

    This was never so hilighted as when the local school administation gave themselvs rases when the voters gave the schools more money. In short the voters voted for a pay rase and didn't even know it untill it was to late.

    Russia dosn't have this problem. No democracy.

    The problem is people like our friend here would run screamming with hands over ears when ever anyone said anything bad about the school system or welfare. They prefer the narrow mindedness of supporting the status que.

    Anyone who challanges welfare.. shows it to be a failure.. is branded anti-poor.
    Anyone who challanges the school system is similerly branded...

    No you can't have a valid consider and be against me... nooo you have to be evil... the dark side... darth vader...

    And then there are people who just want to lable Slashdot... throw around stuff becouse they want open source to be in one political camp.
    They can't stand to realise... a politican canidate who has been STRONGLY open source... Ralf Nader... is NOT Libertarian but a member of the Green Party... A very very propoverty...
    Oh.. and as for consern... want consern? Your are gona love this.... Now I love the green party supporters to death and they are all great people and really have huge hearts... so don't mistake what I'm about to say...

    But the green party party line views the poor as a ecological desaster...
    Yeah.. and amazingly enough the Green Party cares more about the poor than any other party but the offical line lables them not as a human or socal consern but an ecological one...
    Oh well... you really can't read the minds of the people by party lines.
  • No, but my comment was posted for the benifit of those who do. :)
  • BSD/OS is neither free software, Free Software, nor open source.
  • Well, I was comparing candidates, not parties. The differences between the parties are less marked than those between the individuals. For example I could imagine John McCain running Linux and Walter Mondale running an AS/400, for example (c'mon, it's fun!).

    Anyway, are you sure of what you're saying? Care to back it up with URLs? Not that it's that important, of course...

    http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.rnc.org
    www.rnc.org is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
    http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.democrat s.org
    www.democrats.org is running Netscape-Enterprise/2.01 on AIX

    I'm sure the User Friendly strip would not be so surprised, and maybe think it is a hairy deal... ;-)
  • Libertarians favor freeom of everything:
    • The freedom to move between countries.
    • The freedom to do what you want with your own body.
    • The freedom to have an abortion.
    • The freedom to not have to pay for abortions.
    • The freedom to spend what are currently taxed dollars the way you want (e.g. to support pregnant women so they won't have to have abortions).

    Libertarians cut across the left/right spectrum with solutions that appeal to everyone.
  • and I think we are now in new millenium
    Hey Marko!
    Not before next year :-) Bye
    --
  • Heh. That's pretty funny.

    I mentioned the chance of uninformed voters electing a "total boob", and your response sounds like you assumed I meant a third-party candidate. :)

  • Or

    d) Stop ballots. If you can (somehow) get at the boxes between the polling stgation and the counters, you can disrupt it that way.

    OTOH, you don't necessarily have to go to this sort of trouble. The percentage of the population who actually know what the issues and positions are on pretty much anything is _tiny_. Over here, there's been several surveys showing both a public demand for longer prison sentences and a severe underestimation of what sentences were actually handed out. Go figure...

    If you have a reasonable amount of power, the easiest thing to do is to get misinformation out into the halfway trusted mass-market newspapers. In the UK, say the Labour party want to put up taxes lots to make prisons more comfortable and give all new entrants to this country triple benefits. Or the Tories want to, erm, make all education private? Actually, it's getting pretty difficult to come up with something implausibly extreme for Hague to say, he's gone so far right ;) Or that the LibDems (who you'd have to be pretty paranoid to smear at a national level) wanted to rush the UK into a European superstate with no more sovereignty than a US state.

    Let's jump the pond. Bush could say that Gore wants to drastically reduce the size of the military, or Gore that Bush wanted to remove all social protection legislation. Whoops, probably a little close to the bone there, too...

    Anyway, you get the idea. Once you have any degree of media influence, by far the most effective way to disrupt an election is to affect the casting of votes by getting the public to believe utter rubbish. It's rather sad quite to what extent some trust the media :(
  • Al (internet) Gore invented linux in 1983 with a grant from AT&T. Where have you all been?

  • Re:Ehmz (Score:1)

    by Baki ( 72515 )
    You make it sound that that would be coincidence.

    How would it come that the cheapest bidder runs BSD? Could it be because it:
    - is easy (i.e. cheap) to administer
    - gets max. performance from the hardware
    - has least downtime

  • Do you really think that they understand free(dom) software with this [votenader.org] sort of statement (about Y2K)?

    Heh - he needs to get acquainted with shrink-wrap EULAs. Then he'd find out about how much a statement like that one was worth.;)

  • I doubt that Nader and Reform have the slightest notion of the differences in systems. They just sent out word that they wanted secure webservers and then hired the geeks who said that they could do it....
    Even so, it'd be a feather in their caps if they like what they've got and publicly say so.

    Nader's given me a reason to vote for him. :) (as opposed to the 3.73 10^7 reasons not to vote for Bush & Gore.)

  • How? (Score:1)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 )
    So how did they get federal approval to hold on-line voting? last I heard the feds couldnt understand how to add the "screw the middle class" filter installed. Oh and they were wondering how to add in a "be sure the poor cant vote" clause by making it impossible to vote from a public computer (Only your personally owned computer)

    I know, I'm cynical... but all politicians suck.
  • Nader Yes [votenader.org] to MS breakup

    Libertarian [lp.org] Party [lp.org] no(ish) [lp.org] to MS breakup

  • Re:FWIW, (Score:4)

    by Alex Belits ( 437 ) on Monday August 14, 2000 @02:46AM (#857889) Homepage
    BSD/OS is definitely not BSD licensed -- it's a derivative of 4.4BSD that in its turn is a mix of BSD-licensed and other code. BSD-licensed subset of 4.4BSD (known as 4.4BSD-Lite) was used as the starting point for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, so all three are under BSD license now (to be formally correct I should add that they also contain utilities under GPL, X11, perl dual licensing and other Open Source licenses, however usable subset is under BSD license) while BSD/OS isn't.
  • I have a feeling Ol' Ralphy boy doesn't even know what an operating system is. Please don't make his ISP's choice a political thing.

    This is exactly why people hate BSD and other open source products. All this stupid "hey look...he's using it...it must be cool" stuff turns people off. Let its merits speak for itself and the people will come.
  • Neither of them is likely to know the difference between Linux and Charlie Brown's piano playing friend with a similar name.

    Linux & Schroeder don't sound at all alike.

    To make the above post correct, sed 's/piano\ playing/blanket-carrying/'
  • Huh? What?

    Based on everything I've read about Bush (he's a manager, listens to aides, delegates work, doesn't like to deal with things that are of interest to him, likes brief analyses), I truly doubt that he gave any input into the choice of software that runs his web-site. I doubt he knows or cares what's running his official campaign site.

    Realistically, a staffer, or even someone from the RNC, took bids for site-design & hosting, with the lowest bid winning (or someone's brother got the job :) That company is using MS.

    "No the os is going to be an idilog choice... "
    The OS is *not* an ideological issue in the election. The OS used by the company that hosts the web page for the candidate has *zero* significance to the public. That's like saying that the choice of engine in the tour bus McCain used has deep ideological import. Or that Bush chose his ad agency based on the software they use on their design computers.

    That's just silly.
    Don't look for correlation and causality where no exist.
  • The key word here is "could." That's not the same as "will."

    Here's an idea: you libertarians all think that private investment could help poor people better than the government currently does. OK, you guys all go out and provide all the support the government does now, and then come back everyone will agree to get rid of government welfare. Until you can prove that people actually would be helped under your system, I'm not buying it.

  • Most people know how to cover ass (Score:3)

    by Felinoid ( 16872 ) on Monday August 14, 2000 @04:42AM (#857895) Homepage Journal
    Politicians do dictate everything no matter how much they do or don't know.
    Bush selected Microsoft becouse in the Republican idiolog only the wealthyest corpration in America could produce the best operating system. Free is garbage and Bill Gates is the solution.
    Al Gore selected Linux becouse the Democrats basic philosophy of people. Again not an informed tech choice but an idilog that matches the realitys.

    Had Linus been rich and Gates poor Bush would have used Linux...
    Had Windows been open sourced and Linux closed Al would have used Windows...

    It's all idiolog... yes they live sleep eat breath and umm go to the bathroom.. in idilog.. they live what they speak. The become what they say. This allows them to get away with murder as even when covered in blood they embody the views others have. They need not even believe those ideas. Just live them... And with that the need not cover anything.

    Bill Clinton was cought with an intern. Let's face it.. any moron can get away with an affare with a willing subordinate. That was a really sloppy coverup...
    But we forgive him becouse he eat sleeps and breaths what we want him to believe. We'll never know if he believes a word of it. We do know he acts the part really well.

    Thats the point....
    No the os is going to be an idilog choice...
    I'm supprised BSD was used... I'd be supprised of Solarus was used. Thies are better choices but don't match the idilogs as well as Linux or Windows.

    By now my grandmother knows what Linux and Windows is. Not that she could make in informed tech choice. She'd say "I don't use computers" and thats her os choice... NONE...

    In local political campaigns canidates will use oponents choice of operating system to sniff out political views...
    You better belive it matters....
  • (ack! oops! "doesn't like to deal with things that are of interest..." should read "...that are of *no* interest..." Sorry! funny how two letters radically change the meaning of a sentence.)
  • If their own site is like that, I would not want them to make one for me :) (stupid front-page redirect, trying to hold me hostage! And forcing an itty-bitty panel with scroll arrows? Hello, 17" monitor and browser scroll bars! Harumph.)
  • And, there are a few other perks:
    • The freedom to not pay taxes at all.
    • The freedom to decide that you're #1, and everyone else can just go to hell.
    • The freedom to run a predatory, monopolistic company with no fear of government intervention.
    • The freedom to not send your children to school, because you don't want to pay for it
    • The freedom to send your kids to school, and still not pay for it
    Basically, if everyone in the world were a generally nice, well-balanced, logical person, then Libertarianism could do fine. For that matter, if everyone met those criteria, Communism, a benevolent dictatorship, or anarchy would all work just fine.

    I think we've all seen pretty convincingly that it's not going to happen, though. Dreams of a utopia wrought by logic and empathy are far, far older than any Western political movement currently in existence, and I for one am tired of hearing Libertarians go on and on about the perfection of their social ideals.

    There are no perfect Republics in the real world, and people, as a group, are still violent pack animals, driven as much by hormones and greed as by intellect and compassion.

  • Crackers, script kiddies, the Dems, the Republicans? The mind boggles, the newest political plumbers have to fix internet pipes now. It is a good sign for the BSD's, though, I myself recommended them this week as the safest internet host, a cut about MacOS because MacOS is closed.
  • Looks like you got *my* idea...
    Anyway, disinformation and propaganda is considered part of the game. Outright cheating is not.

    I don't think online voting can solve the old problems of a democracy. I was merely wondering how to avoid causing new ones.

  • Ehmz (Score:4)

    by Lion-O ( 81320 ) on Monday August 14, 2000 @02:24AM (#857901)
    "It's nice to see political parties believe in freedom of software."

    Do they really? Or did they just happen to have some smart people around who were able to grab the best tool for this specific job.

  • I doubt that Nader and Reform have the slightest notion of the differences in systems. They just sent out word that they wanted secure webservers and then hired the geeks who said that they could do it....

    Or maybe I'm just a cynical bastard this morning.

  • I want these political parties to be 100% in favor of freedom of people!

    We already have freedom of software. There is no law against using Linux or BSD. My freedom includes the freedom to use Windows, MacOS or Solaris. Patents and copyrights might be valid political issues, but the since the time of the first vacumn tube, the right to create and distribute Free and Open Source Software was always ours.

    It's absolutely stupid to judge a candidate by whether they use the software you prefer. What's next, judging them by whether they use the same aftershave as do?
  • ... ever since that /. article with those terrible graphics I've been dying to try out BSD. Not that Pat, Ralph or Jessie have anything to do with it.
  • this was a political move, not anything coming from some deep idealogical standpoint

    Don't want to get in a political discussion, but "a political move" can be good enough: he's been aware of the importance of the internet for a long time, and is trying to do the right thing on it. Not bad.

    But indeed, trying, and being lame in the trying, is maybe worse than doing nothing. That's the Republicans' main point against bore, I mean Gore.

    Side note: I guess the web development company hired by Gore 2000 could be described as "centrist":
    IDEV is a Microsoft Certified Solutions Provider. That means we can leverage the power of Windows, SQL Server, and other Microsoft technologies to rapidly build active web applications.


    IDEV is also an active participant in the "Open Source" movement. Many of our websites benefit from the stability and reliability of Linux, and we use PHP, Perl 5, MySQL, and other well-supported, open tools..
    From http://www.idev.com/ (wow I really hate their web site).
  • > The freedom to not have to pay for abortions.

    Libertarians are pretty much categorically AGAINST things like this being spoon-fed by the government. I suggest you visit www.issues2000.org and read Harry Browne's platform.
  • Hey, what can I say, some of the things that these guys do makes sense, and some is just a little too radical, held under the reform party umbrella, schweet move!

  • Of course, but I figured that was a subset of a)
    /Guran

  • Bush=MS, Gore=Linux (Score:3)

    by Frog ( 17924 ) on Monday August 14, 2000 @02:26AM (#857909)
    Why am I not surprised?

    http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.georgewb ush.com
    www.georgewbush.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0

    http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.algore20 00.com
    www.algore2000.com is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.1pl2 secured_by_Raven/1.5.1 on Linux
  • Not only does the LP use BSD/OS, the site itself [lp.org] was constructed with MySQL and PHP.

    I agree that this is not the only way (or even the best way) to choose a political affiliation.

    However, if you want to know which party "gets" the Open Source movement, there's really only one answer [lp.org].

  • Bandwidth/data space costs have much more bearing on the price of your hosting than any choice of OS. Although i'm not saying it is a coincedence that a hosting company would choose to use a Free, secure, stable Operating System.
  • to protect the wealthy (only police and justice).

    So if I work hard for a living, I'm not entitled to protection?

    I've lived in the poor parts of town, and let me tell you that it is *nothing* like what the Liberals would have you think. If those people weren't so lazy, they wouldn't be poor! A simple solution, wouldn'y you agree?

    -- Floyd

  • Well, most people here are constantly ranting about the evils of government/socialism/capitalism or whatever half-baked idea they have at the time, and going on about how only libertarianism can save us all from the evils of life.

    And as for poor people, well I've read some great statements on both /. and k5 about how poor people just need to get up off of their arses and stop being so lazy. After all, if they wanted to have money then they'd obviously have it! Since this is the case then things like welfare are just a waste of money and it might encourage them to earn something if they knew that they'd be left to rot on the streets otherwise.

    Some fine examples of just how out of touch slashbots are with the rest of reality.

  • That's Buchanan and Reform Party, not Nader and Green Party.
  • There are many dimensions to political view. I think two of the major ones are liberal/conservative, and then libertarian/authoritarian. Most geeks would have a libertarian streak to them, but that does not really dictate whether they are liberal or conservative...for instance, I'm a libertarian liberal.

    see: http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html
  • Actually, some years back, my roommate Josh worked for Thinking Machines (some of the first massively parallel computers), and gave a demo to Al Gore, who might not have been VP yet at the time.

    There was lots of press around as he gave the demo to an attentive Gore, who then earnestly asked him a question: "What is there in common between fractals and holograms?".

    Josh was a little nonplussed by this question, hesitated as the cameras whirred and the flashes flashed, wondering if this guy was for real -- prepped question? Real intellectual curiosity?

    For the record Josh showed (I thought) grace under fire by finally replying "Self-similarity?". Al seemed content with the answer and moved on to the next photo-op.

    Anyway in Gore's case, his record shows it's likely that he knows about Linux, though of course we're never sure if he knows about it because he thinks it's cool or because he thinks it's important career-wise. He is a politician...

    Conversely I can see the Bushies straightforwardly going for the "no one was ever not elected for picking Microsoft" route.

    So I'm not judging the candidates by their (or their employees) choice, just finding it slightly representative of their outlooks. Gore's a "nerd", Bush is a "regular guy".

  • Re:Source Code Audit (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A sourcecode audit has been done on the base OpenBSD system (so that's the base install, stuff in packages/ports hasn't been checked (it would take years). What you mean by "obsd team's audit of the FreeBSD source that became obsd", i don't know :) OpenBSD was based on netBSD (a project to which theo deraadt was a core member)
  • "...those people..."? How in the hell do you think you can say what's true of millions of people? Let me guess: you did a creaful interview of every poor person, evaluated their willingness to work, their opportunities to improve their economic situation, and the barriers they might have faced in that attempt. Based on that data, you came to a careful scientific conclusion that poor people are lazy, and therefore should not be helped or pitied.

    Or, did you simply not notice the ones who were working two jobs and trying to support a family, because they were never lounging around the neighborhood in the middle of the day. Because of your personal observations in one town, you can safely generalize that all poor people are lazy? No, I don't think so; just because you have an MIT email address does not mean you are omniscient.

  • So, should we go back to the ideals of the founding fathers that state that all citizens can adn should vote, but only male, white landowners are true citizens? Or better yet, to noble Rome, where all citizens can vote, but only male, native, landowning soldiers can vote? Or would you propose something more modern, like a psychiatric evaluation, IQ test, and willingness to accept demographic surveys from corporate sponsors?

    There is no fair way to distinguish between those who have a right to vote and those who don't, if you want any claim towards being a democracy. The desire to do so is a remenant of ancient, pack animal, tribal leadership, where the guy who could beat up all the other guys was chief. The only way to improve the quality of any nation is to educate its population as well as possible, so they will more effectively govern themselves.

  • And now for an equally stunning orignal riposte:

    Free Software has nothing to do with Free Speech. Free speech gives me the right to create and release closed source binary-only software, or Open Source, as I prefer. Even if I release the software as public domain I am still not required to divulge the source code.

    In the past there have been restrictions, regulations and prohibitions against your use of speech and the press. But no one has ever been prohibited against creating and distribution their own Free and Open Source Software. There may be some problems with patents, but that's a whole different ball of wax.
  • I have yet to find any libertarian organization that has spoken out against UCITA.

    Then you haven't looked very far. I seem to recall arguments against UCITA from Reason Magazine and the CATO Institute. Also check out www.libertyboard.org for a slashdot like libertarian discussion site. It has covered UCITA in several articles.
  • I can and will vote for Gore simply because his website is running on an OS that I approve of.

    I'm sure it is a great mercy to Tocqueville that he died long before you came along.

  • Gosh, I really don't have anything better to do...

    Just to debate your point into oblivion, I think it does say something, not a lot, about each candidate. If McCain rode around in an ethanol-powered or elecric bus, that would say a little something, even if some large percentage of buses nation-wide were similarly powered. It would say: maybe it's just random chance, or maybe McCain encourages environmentally-friendly or futuristic behavior among his aides or has aides that do so. 's all.

    Call it "trickle-up" technology choices... And of course if it's somebody's brother who got the job and made the choice, well that says a little something too. It's more like a data point, not some deep insight or anything.

    Actually I must be sick but I'd be curious to know more about how exactly each candidate's campaign set up and runs their web site. Anyone know more or have pointers on such info?
  • "...from the Greens' watermelon platform. (watermelon=green on the outside, red on the inside).

    Oooo..

    "..green on the outside, red on the inside..."

    I get it!

    They're all a bunch of communists!

    Kinda reminds me of when my right-wing uncle used to rant about "...long-haired men and short-haired women..."

    Now, those were the days!

    t_t_b
    --
    I think not; therefore I ain't®

  • leereyno wrote:
    > Neither of them is likely to know the difference between Linux and Charlie Brown's piano playing friend with a similar name.

    Do you mean Schroeder?
  • Bush selected Microsoft becouse in the Republican idiolog only the wealthyest corpration in America could produce the best operating system. Free is garbage and Bill Gates is the solution.

    Al Gore selected Linux becouse the Democrats basic philosophy of people. Again not an informed tech choice but an idilog that matches the realitys.

    It's time someone came along and hit you upside the head with a cluestick. Where's Huey when you need him...

    It makes not one whit of difference which OS their websites are running on. If you think it does you need a good stiff drink of reality. Turn off the computer, step outside, and stand in the sun. Your vitamin D level is getting low.
  • No, no, no, Libertarians are for the freedom of not being forced to pay for *other* people's abortions. If you want one, you have to pay for it in a libertarian state; you will not be permitted to coerce tax dollars out of pro-life people for your abortion. Sorry, I guess I was unclear on who was paying and who was getting.
    -russ
  • Sure. Look at your tax return. Now imagine that you could spend that money to support single mothers. They'd get a lot more than they do under a system of welfare, between you and everybody else that would like to help single mothers.
    -russ
  • Oh, yeah? What "long-haired hippy" chose Windows 2000 + IIS for Bush? The answer is none. A suit with money coming out his pores probably did. And that does shed a light on Bush: he's a fortunate son of an oil tycoon.
  • Sorry.

    ESR says otherwise. No guns, no geek.

    -- Floyd
  • When at /., what is of interest to me is what OS/package some of these websites are running. It would be neat to some of the stats from each one (hits, data transfered, etc), interviews or background on the person(s) responsible, whether they chose a dedicated server option, multiple servers, or bought 10MB from a webhosting company, and possibly, where technology fits in with each candidate's philosophy (although that usually has no substance).

    What matters not to me are the politics espoused by these websites and each /. opinion regarding them. I read about politics elsewhere and have no plans to be swayed by one /. opinion or another.

    ymmv,

  • Lars (Score:1)

    by MouseR ( 3264 )
    I bet it was Lars trying to get in to add their system in the banned users list.

  • Re:Source Code Audit (Score:3)

    by wbb4 ( 60942 ) on Monday August 14, 2000 @02:59AM (#857933)
    You have your stories a bit wrong.

    About 5 years ago, Theo left (to be nice) the NetBSD project to form OpenBSD. All of the BSDs borrow code from each other, but all also develop a lot of code themselves.

    OpenBSD has more NetBSD code in it than FreeBSD, it anything, and all of that code undergoes a code -level audit before an OpenBSD release ships. This helps security and it helps stability (what better way to find bugs?)
  • Well, the way they suggest helping the poor is basically through charity (unless I'm mistaken). It is my opinion that instead of designing a system that enables wild extremes of wealth and then "hoping" the wealthy give some back to the poor, we should design the system so that there aren't such wild extremes in the first place. I don't care what you think, Bill Gates is not ($4 billion / ~$28,000) times a better human than the average person. Sure the system is broken now. That's not an excuse to do *nothing*.

    I also challenge the view that government is the wolf itself. Sure government can be corrupted (um, for instance by billions of corporate dollars). Remember this thing called "government" is what we created to get out of the "natural state", that we all agreed in the 1800's was no good. What we need to do is fix the system, and enact barriers to corrupting influence (for one, strike down the law that makes corporations full-fledged citizens, that's just bullshit; and two, publicly finance elections - no PAC money...both positions Nader is taking). Removing the system because you think that order is inherently evil will just land you back in the "natural state". Fortunate for some of the people who espouse this, this is exactly where they want to be.
  • So, should we go back to the ideals of the founding fathers that state that all citizens can adn should vote, but only male, white landowners are true citizens?

    No.

    What we should do is keep voting laws just at they are, in that all adult citizens (who are not felons) have the right to vote if they choose to do so.

    My point was that the choice to not vote is a valid choice, and what is more, for some people it is the wiser choice. All that "Rock the Vote" propaganda is really just encouraging people who sit and watch MTV all day to go out and vote for whoever they think is "cooler".

    Not voting is a fundamental right. Don't let anybody browbeat you into thinking it is your "civic duty" to vote; if you are unsure about your choice of candidate, you can choose to accept the decision of the majority without including your own uncertain input. Don't let anybody tell you "if you don't vote, you don't have the right to complain"; your First Amendment rights are not invalidated because you did not participate in an election.

    And by the way, here's a little tidbit that a lot of people don't know:

    You do NOT have to fill out every part of a ballot for your vote to count! If you vote this year on the Presidential election (Gore, Bush, Browne, Nader, whoever), and there is also a peon county judge election on the ballot, you can ignore that section if you have no f*ing clue who either of those people are.

    Here in Minnesota, we have a common problem that we call the "Scandanavian Name Principle". Basicly, if two people are running for City Council or State Representative during a big national election, the one with a name like "Carlson" will almost always win over somebody with a non-Scandinavian last name. This is because schmuck that were practically shoved into the voting boths by Get Out The Vote efforts, and only know who the two big party Presidential candidates are (sort of), think they need to fill out the rest of the ballot for it to count, so they pick people down the rest of the ballot using really strange criteria, such as familiar-sounding last names.

    So please allow me to be the only person who tells you not to bother voting if you are not up on the issues, and if you do vote, not to vote on smaller elections that you know nothing about.

  • d) Stop ballots. If you can (somehow) get at the boxes between the polling stgation and the counters, you can disrupt it that way

    You can stop the ballots before they even get to the box. Election results in many countries have been influenced because of intimidation by both government and para-governmental militias. BLow up a polling station as a warning, shoot up some neighbourhoods where your enemies live.

    With enough planning, it might be possible for a selective DoS to keep your enemies from voting online. If you can identify where they are coming from, or the time of day they are likely to vote, or simply find that a lower turnout in general will influence the result in your favour, just make it hard for voters to get through.

  • Ralph Nader is running on the Green Party ticket. I think that free (as in speech) software corresponds closely with the Green Party's ideals. I attended a Ralph Nader speech this year, he is very concerned about the power that large corporations weild. And that Bill Gate's net worth is equal to the lowest 120 million Americans.

  • With enough planning, it might be possible for a selective DoS to keep your enemies from voting online. If you can identify where they are coming from, or the time of day they are likely to vote, or simply find that a lower turnout in general will influence the result in your favour, just make it hard for voters to get through.

    Now that was my point. If there is no central server to DoS, but a large number of servers, each serving a random subset of voters, you would have a much harder time DoS-ing them AND you could not make make a more aimed effort (unless, as you suggested, you know that your opponents supporters are more likely to vote at a certain time)

    Sure you could still keep *some* people away, but it would not be a predictable result.

  • If anything, online voting should encourage voter turnout, which is a Good Thing.

    This is one of the worst myths in the American political landscape, that more voters is always good news.

    Since I have no polling data handy, please allow me to illustrate my point using wholly made-up numbers. Even if they are completely wrong, it has little do do with my point...

    Let's imagine for a moment that 60% of the US popuation is politically active and engaged. They follow the news, they pay attention to what their local government is doing, they know who their representatives are. (Perhaps too big of a number, but like I said, this is just an illustration.)

    This group of is divided into a few distinct camps: 30% loyal Republicans, 30% loyal Democtrats, and 40% "swing" voters who may go either way or vote 3rd party. These swing voters therefore represent a little over 20% of the US voting-age population. In a low-turnout year, the candidate who presents the better case for election to this 20% of the population will usually win.

    But in a high turn-out year, a large part of the other 40% of the US, (the Jerry Springer watching, clueless, pro wrestling fan) shows up and votes for the candidate with who appeals to them more for really stupid reasons (better looks, funnier jokes, uses a better OS on their web page, etc.) These people can actually overwhelm the input of the informed voters, and elect a total boob.

    When the sufferage movement finally won votes for women, Warren Harding (who was not well-liked by the sufferage leaders) won by a landslide, in part because he took most of the female vote. When polls were taken, sufferagists were dismayed by the news that many women voted for Harding "because he's so handsome".

  • Oops !

    I forgot you are even allied int this horrible conspiracy/Big brother project called Echelon !!
    ;-)

    More seriously France has always considered US as an ally, however when it comes on the subject of national security there's always a tendancy to put the emphasis on the word NATIONAL.

    I just wonder if it was the same by your side in the states...
    (Seems that it isn't...
    )
  • I thought he claimed to have invented the Internet. :)
    I could be wrong, though...

    -- Sig (120 chars) --
    Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.

  • I don't care what you think, Bill Gates is not ($4 billion / ~$28,000) times a better human than the average person.

    Hmm, so you measure a person's worth through the amount of money they have? Wow, you're a real "people" person aren't you?

  • I think you may be right about the Reform party, but Nader should be quite aware of what O/S he's using. Remember, Nader headed up the "Assessing Microsoft" conference a few years back, long before the various lawsuits against MS were so popular.
  • I have a feeling Ol' Ralphy boy doesn't even know what an operating system is.

    Your feeling would be wrong. The first reference I have was from about two years ago, as a quick search on google [google.com] shows.

  • Well said. The turnout for the US elections keep dropping to the point that loons like Pat Robertson get in. A substantial geek turnout for Nader would, at the very least, send a message to the 'evil of two lessers' that people can't stomach at the moment.
  • me : "GWBush, why do you like BSD?" GWB : "I dont listen to HipHop"
  • Well, it's a primary, so they don't really need federal approval, since it's just inside the party.
  • "It's nice to see political parties believe in freedom of software."

    No they don't. They pay smart people to believe in it for them. What it really comes down to is who pays off the most people and kisses the most ass on Capitol Hill. This is why when the DOJ went after Intel for antitrust, Intel ran to Washington to make sure that their buddies in congress cleaned up the whole mess. Thsi is why when Sun and Netscape spent years buying off politicians while Micros~t was basking in the light of their ill-gotten gains, the government jumped all over Micros~t like white on rice.

    And most of all, this is why after the next round of elections, Micros~t will be the US Government's best friend.

    Politicians and their parties believe in money. Not free software.
  • I don't know is the government really that much larger an object of hate and online attacks, then, say, Microsoft? Maybe there are more people that hate the U.S. government, but I'd be willing to bet that more hackers and script kiddies alike hate MS.

    But I do believe that we need some foolproof method of tamper-proofing online voting before we switch to it. My ideas:

    Make all voting records public. That's right, if you want to, you should be able to download every gigabyte of votes cast, and count them to make sure the totals are correct. Each vote should be identified by a one-way hash of the voter's name and password, to keep things anonymous. That way each voter could check that his own vote was recorded correctly.

    That would effectively prevent hackers from removing or changing votes or changing the vote totals without being discovered. You could improve on it (e.g. have the vote-collecting server return a digitally signed copy of the vote + date/time, so you could prove "yes I did submit this vote at this time"), but it's still got a big problem - how do you prevent a hacker from inserting new votes? I don't know any foolproof way (short of removing anonymous voting) to protect against that.

    Any ideas?

  • Topic says it all. Sure, with floppie (cdrom for some like NT) I can secure most any OS from crackers trying to write changes.

    Add in your turn off other services I can help prevent them from getting in.

    What if there is a hole in the web server? It has happened before ya know. Or maybe a ping of death type attack. Whatever. Once the OS is shutdown or cracked (think shutdown -h now) someone needs to (perhaps physically) reboot the machine. Since machines tend to take a few minutes to reboot (mine takes over a minute in the bios, though half of that is finding my scsi harddrives). It is fairly simple once a hole is found to shutdown the machine, to write a script to do so.

    Remember this is a poltical website. You have to consider that the person doing the cracking might not just be a script kiddie, he might be an otherwise intellegant adult with poltical motivations. Someone trying to shutdown a website for political reasons isn't as interested in gaining root as he is with keeping others off the net. Few people can afford to do a DoS attack against a machine where the slowest link is a T3. (Which a good hosting company will probably have just to deal with the bandwidth normally seen)

  • My personal opinion is that welfare _is_ a huge waste of money if government doesn't provide decent education for the same category of people -- people that are poor and ignorant will remain poor if they will remain ignorant. It isn't hard to build a good government-sponsored (because certainly no one else will sponsor such a thing) educational system that can provide well-designed curriculum, and is open to all people that are capable of learning. I am doing just fine after studying in Russia where such a thing was implemented, and so can most of other people, poor or not. It only requires some smart teachers that write courses and teach students, and some smart politicians that write laws and allocate money for it... Oh, I forgot, we are in US -- now I see the problem.
  • You are wrong!!! OpenBSD code never came from NetBSD, OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD, and as a matter of fact, FreeBSD has borrowed more codes from OpenBSD than OpenBSD has done from FreeBSD. Partially because OpenBSD finds the bug firsts and FreeBSD copies, OpenBSD implments advanced crypto funtionality which other BSD's borrow. The place where OpenBSD is trying to borrow from FreeBSD now is SMP support.

  • Guns are the tool of the righteous man, allowing one to defend oneself against the depredations of a society increasingly consumed by such capitalist ills as poverty, atheism and drugs. Thanks to the liberal pro-"freedom" mindset that pervades our government, corporations led by greedmongers and Satanists lead the way to the corruption of the weaker elements of society, leaving a wake of gang violence, crack addicts and hardneded criminals, all of whome require dealing with in the harshest way by concerned Christians.

    That's what your problem is in the UK - you don't have the courage to do your part for your country and for God. Removing the dead wood of society is your duty as both a Christian and as a man.

  • Distributed online voting perhaps? (Score:3)

    by guran ( 98325 ) on Monday August 14, 2000 @03:39AM (#857958)
    I did some thinking and came up with the following:
    There are two ways to tamper with an election (exept for the usual unholy game called election campaign)
    a) You either try to cheat outright, replacing notes with "Guy X" printed on them with notes with "Guy Y" (or flood the booth with "Guy Y" votes, or rig the lists or counting) or
    b) You disturb the election itself. Making it difficult for your opponents suspected supporters to vote.

    Real life meatspace voting is not so easy to disturb. Sure, you can cause a lot of trouble, but to seriously affect the outcome of an election, you must have lots of people with you messing vith voting booths all over the country. That means to pull it off you must be big enough to be an important political factor anyway.

    Online voting may be more sensitive to tampering than traditional voting since a single cracker, with or without a political agenda, might try to alter the results (method a) or simply DoS the voting server (method b).

    Now the best way to counter this threat would be to large number of voting servers, each taking votes from a random subset of the population. This way one successful cracker attempt will be a nuisance, like a single bomb threat on election day, but will hardly have any affect on the overall results.

  • They feel at home (Score:5)

    by pigpogm ( 70382 ) <michael@pigpog.com> on Monday August 14, 2000 @02:28AM (#857961) Homepage
    Maybe politicians just feel comfortable with the innocent looking devil logo?
  • IOActive says that a 'source code audit' was done, on OpenBSD presumably. Did they actually perform their own audit or are they relying on the obsd team's audit of the FreeBSD source that became obsd?

    Or are they talking about something else entirely?

  • Or, did they just outsource the hosting to the cheapest bidder, and this hosting company just happened to be running BSD? That seems much more likly.
  • I mean, not even I am using Linux because I do believe in Open Source, but because I like the way it works

    Okay, that's fine. I personally use Debian GNU/Linux because I believe in Free Software. Just because you're pragmatic doesn't mean everyone else should be.

    Imagine Ralph Nader pondering night after night over what OS should he choose for his campaign website server?

    Not Nader personally, but I could imagine a campaign staffer or volunteer chose Free Software because it agrees with the Reform Party's ideas (note: I'm not American, and the only American party I know anything about is the Libertarian Party. If the Reform Party are really a bunch of authoritarian dictators, then they're being hypocritical).

    That a politician is using a certain operating system for his campaign?

    What's wrong with that? Not all politicians are corrupt; besides, as you say, this choice may have been entirely based on the technical quality of BSD. Hosting a political website that has to serve lots of traffic while under constant attack is a fairly strenous test. Just like hosting the website of any large company, I think this is an event the BSD community can be proud of.

  • I mean : if there is a budget, then it might be a commercial environment, else, it will be a (good therefore) "DIY" solution.

    How amazingly we see some "polemic people" using "polemic software" :
    • www.scientology.org is running WebSitePro/2.5.4 on NT4 or Windows 98
    • www.hitlerisgod.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/4.1 on Windows 2000
    And also some weird surprises ...
    • www.be.com is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) PHP/3.0.12 on FreeBSD
    • www.royal.gov.uk is running Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) on Linux

    --
  • One thing to learn very quickly in polytics is every politician is a micro dictator.
    They dictate everything from server policy to office methidology.
    Anything a canidate can do himself he will do himself.
    No some hippy did NOT pick server policy. If there is some hippy running the servers he was hand picked by the canidate himself. Not the best person for the job but a volintear the canidate himself feels good about. In short only way you'll get a hippy tech is from a hippy canidate...

    Micro dictators meaning they fight the urge and they know better but they WANT to Micromanage. They can't. But anything they can dabble with they will.

    The first thing that happend when the servers went up was the canidate himself picked the os. Windows for the Republicans becouse the worlds richest corpration makes the best operating systems. It runs on from there.

    Server policy is very much idilogicly defined and the idilog making those choices is the canidate himself. Not the SysAdm.. who is most likely a volintear with a similer world view...

    Canidates do this becouse let's face it.. voters do what Slashdot is doing. Every step every look every blink must present the canidates agenda. They can not allow some kid to pick the system if say Linux dosn't say of the canidate all the canidate wants.

    One area where libertarians and the green party agree is on poverty. They don't agree on solutions but they agree a dramaticly diffrent policy on poverty is nessisary. In that they disagree with the Republicans and Democrats ideas on addressing poverty.

    A classic addatude BTW is "AntiPoor" means "Disagrees with my solution".
    The Republicans DO have a solution for poverty. You may find it distastful and wrong and just plain stupid but it's clearly not "throw them to the wolfs". Thow some conservitive Republicans I've talked to do feel poverty is not an issue to address.. they have the "if they weren't lazy they wouldn't be poor" addatude it dosn't accually boil down so simply however it's compatable with the sentiment. Probably better said "If they work really hard they won't be poor for long" a bit more of an enlightend view suggesting that poverty itself is a sign of hard times and hard times are overcome with hard work.
    It's a good idea. But it takes more than that. I do believe hard work is part of the over all solution but it's going to take some leadership to convence the poor to work hard and give them a target to work for. Not workfair or any such simple minded goals. But now I'm politicing and my ideals arn't running so I'll shut up on that for now.

    The Democrats want to use governemt policys. This is ok. Help programs etc. The addatude here is "Only by government can anything be done" a absolutly wrong addatude.
    This policy can work becouse the governemnt can get things done. But by far this is not the only posable solution.

    Libertarians (at least the ones I talked to) want to solve the homeless problem with non-proffits. Many Democrats and Republicans also view this as a good solution.

    Also preposed for local enforcment was zoning areas where homeless can set up tents or home made structures. Such policys are not populare and may be very short sited. This policy gets most of it's support from the green and libertarian partys. It gets NO support from the Democrats or Republicans.

    Back to my politicing. My personal favorate policy is to take money going to the welfair burrocracy and send it out to non-proffits in the form of governemnt grants. This is becouse non-proffits have a better success rate for getting poor into work. They have more comprehensive programs. They do trainning etc. They find the needs of the poor and addapt accordingly.

    One non-proffit I know asked why people had a hard time getting work. The answer.. they couldn't present themselvs properly. They came to the interviews dressed improperly they didn't have a mailing address that sort of problem.
  • ...must be allowed both ways. Yes, it is nice to see some diversity in the software being used by political entities -- but my vote doesn't hinge on someone's choice of operating system.

    I sense another case of "operating system bigotry" here. Using Linux/BSD doesn't make a candidate good or bad; perhaps they only picked an "alternative" OS to attract techy geeks. And I doubt the candidates themselves have much of a clue about operating systems... such choices are made by staffers.

    It may surpise the zealots of Slahsdot, but there are legitimate and sound reasons for running a Microsoft product. If Slashdot truly advocates freedom, then it shouldn't look down on someone who makes a choice that differs from the "party line."

    Freedom only works if everyone is free...

  • Hrmmm, people's memories are short. When Al started up the "Opensource website" crap, I seem to remember that he was actually running NT or something. Only after people started crying hypocrisy did he switch to Linux. (ie, this was a political move, not anything coming from some deep idealogical standpoint)

  • I don't visit K5 much but it's intresting you've read so much on Slashdot about poverty considering Slashdot amd K5 are tech forums and poverty never comes up byond some fears that the poor don't have access to technology.

    Of course, apart from the story "Poverty in America" which was on kuro5hin about a week before it went down. There was plenty of the kind of thing I'm talking about under that story.

  • First, "Nader and the rest of his Libertarians" sounds very funny considering that he is not Libertarian but Green. Second, why do you think that slashdot users are against poor people? Because some weirdo said few days ago that geeks are libertarians?
  • Please don't judge candidates based on what OS their employees choose to use. Neither of them is likely to know the difference between Linux and Charlie Brown's piano playing friend with a similar name. As successful politicians, they know how to kiss the asses of the general public while effectively covering their own. What, if anything, they know other than this can be catagorized as trivia. Lee

  • Re:Oh sweet Jesus Christ (Score:4)

    by scotay ( 195240 ) on Monday August 14, 2000 @02:35AM (#857984)
    Libertarians are NOT anti-poor. Libertarians don't want to throw people to the wolves. Libertarians believe the government IS the wolf!

    Libertarians want to help the poor at the local level. They don't want the federal government taking all your money to Washington with the hope that they will give it back to your community.

    If you believe the federal welfare state actually helps the poor, vote for some other party.

  • Could this stop online voting for a while? (Score:3)

    by Duxup ( 72775 ) on Monday August 14, 2000 @02:38AM (#857987) Homepage
    I'm sure if online voting were implemented in larger elections we would see a many more attacks, and from many more people. I'm sure there are plenty of other organizations that would to effect American (or any other nation for that matter) elections. I wonder if this won't be the biggest obstacle to online voting.

    If we were to implement online voting in the US for a national election, I wonder if it would even be technically possible due to the sheer number of attacks sure to come.
  • Yes, and when you look at the sites for the political parties, the Democrats are running NT and the Republicans Solaris. Big hairy deal.
  • It may surpise the zealots of Slahsdot, but there are legitimate and sound reasons for running a Microsoft product.

    We're working on it.

    Your Working Boy,

  • You were ironic, weren't you? (Score:3)

    by jw3 ( 99683 ) on Monday August 14, 2000 @02:40AM (#857996) Homepage
    I mean, not even I am using Linux because I do believe in Open Source, but because I like the way it works (among others) and consider it to be superior to any alternatives. And I did choose my OS. They... erm. Imagine Ralph Nader pondering night after night over what OS should he choose for his campaign website server? I really doubt whether he can distinguish between server, website and Internet at all (OK, OK, so he *knows* that it was one of your bright american politicians who has invented the latter - G,D&R). However, the professionalists who were dealing with the details did choose the OS -- that means, that those systems are fit, good, stable, etc. Good. Some professionalists are using BSD now. Great news. When will you report that men landed on the Moon? :-)

    On the other hand... I mean, is that really a good argument for you? That a politician is using a certain operating system for his campaign?

    Like, you trust them?

    Best regards,

    January

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