ORG talk
Some notes from the ORG presentation:
Too many things are not caught til too late – far easier to tackle things earlier.
ORG formed to tackle things earlier, to campaign on digital issues. Based on EFF.
Formed when Suw Charman said she would like to organise something in the UK, but only if 1000 people said they would contribute 5GBP. She got her 1000 from pledge bank..and the organisation was formed. the focus was to catch the issues, to have an overview for new issues, to act as a safety net and first point of call, supporting the single issue groups.
Some issues include :
e-voting, observed the recent elections. One issue is where polling papers were being scanned electronically. One manual recount found that there were 55% more papers than the machines had found. The overall result in Scotland was nearly tipped to Labour instead of SNP because of Excel and screen resolution on a laptop. The last areas (from the islands) were typed into spreadsheet, but the SNP did not win – because there was a hidden column hidden on the spreadsheet and 2 winners had not been counted. In England, one Labour Candidate wanted to vote first online, Looking at the form, the Conservative candidate had the Labour logo and was listed as the Conservation candidate; on submitting the site crashed; ringing the 24 hour support line he found out there was no one there. As observers, they could not actually prove that they were correct, they had no audit trail. The recommendation is that the government should not continue doing these trials without more work.
DRM: eg the Sony Rootkit, Getting consultations on DRM. For DRM consultations earlier, they took 3 music groups and 3 non music groups, asked them to give short presentations about DRM. ORG grouped together time and gave full presentation about DRM. Asked them to treat the issue as a consumer rights issue, get it labelled. Sony was the first counter-presentation was basically ‘please don’t hurt us we won’t do it again’. Next up – DRM stops piracy. Last up, the indi record label says out customers don’t like DRM, we like to please our customers, please ban DRM. As a result, the All Party Internet group recommended labelling, then went to the Treasury review. This may become reality in a few years,.
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