the only analogy that wasn't drawn yet is the one with the homer ...

what i find interesting is the statement i heard yesterday at the austrian ministery of science and research that mail voting can't be implemented for the student elections, as it is not one election, but a serial of. if that is true and there is a legal aspect to it, counting electronic votes from all universities at one single place in one machine wouldn't be possible either, no? guess the question is if mail voting in this case is a legal or practical challenge, besides of all other problems of that system, one has to add.

too many things not thought through, imho. yet, the question if democracy can be supported by technology remains an interesting one if one keeps in mind that the network is not designed to be democratic, as it is not designed to be random but scale free, laszlo barabási argued already some years ago. anyhow, not all agree but add: it's not a fundamental principle, it's a property.

when the attempt to use networks for democracy (audio/mpeg, 586 KB) leads to more of the same.

anyhow, about cryptography one should take some time to listen to:
rsa09 panelists: whitfield diffie martin hellman, nuclearRisk: "unable to recognize risk until it's too late", "cassandra is always right" ron rivest, scantegrity: "voting hardest sec problem, mentions cassandra chanting, nist sha-3 competition for new hash functions, bruce schneier has a horse there ... adi shamir, worries about cloud computing as data will be handled by few companies ... worried also about law enforcement: quotes an article he read saying: the chances to be killed by a policeman is eight time higher than being killed by a terrorist bruce schneier: kind of bored with cloud computing, feels like how computing was and is: it's all about trust; prospect theory, recommended book: science of fear,