Machinist

This election has been full of superlatives and firsts. I've never been prouder to be an American abroad than right now. The historic rise of this unlikely candidate, in the unlikely story that is America, fueled by this unlikely swelling of the online masses donating in unprecedented numbers, is nothing short of historic and astonishing.

But there were also a few troubling episodes on the technological front, with text messages and e-mails being used as a way to perpetuate false information.

Wired reported late last night that voters in Florida and New Mexico received a fake text message from 505-507-6041 that says things like: "Due to long lines if you are voting for Barack Obama you can vote tomorrow," or "Due to the long lines today, all Obama voters are asked to vote on Wednesday."

The AP adds that there have been reports of similar "robo-calls" and fake texts in Missouri and that the Missouri secretary of state and U.S. Attorney's Office have been notified. I'm glad that this wasn't widespread enough to have made a difference, but it's still a troubling development.

But that's not all. Thousands of students at George Mason University received an e-mail spoofed to look like it was from Provost Peter N. Stearns saying that "election day has been moved to November 5th. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you." Apparently the FBI is on the case.

And finally, while the outcome of the election was by a pretty overwhelming margin, there were still problems with electronic voting in numerous states, although not enough to have any sort of real impact.

Still,  we as a country really need to have a single standard for federal elections, get rid of these awful e-voting machines, and streamline this whole process so we don't have to deal with this kind of crap anymore.

On a more personal and professional note, I share with you the news that this is my last post in Machinist, which is going on hiatus beginning tomorrow.

I thank all of you for reading and for your thoughtful and critical comments. If you'd like to follow me and/or any of my other work on public radio or elsewhere, you can do so on my blog: cyrusfarivar.com (where I'll be announcing the result of our little trial voter-verified election), and/or you can email me at cfarivar [at] cfarivar [dot] org.

Cheers!

Among the wackiest technologies that I've seen during this election night is CNN's hologram technology -- something that was predicted back in the Star Wars era.

There's not much info as to exactly how this stuff works, other than what USA Today has reported:

CNN will have 44 cameras and 20 computers in each remote location to capture 360-degree imaging data of the person being interviewed. Images are processed and projected by computers and cameras in New York. There'll also be plasma TVs in Chicago and Phoenix that will let the people being interviewed see Blitzer and other CNN correspondents. Bohrman says the network can project two different views from each city so Blitzer can appear to be in the studio with two holograms.

Jessica Yellin was the first CNN reporter to be "beamed" to the New York newsroom, where Wolf Blitzer interviewed her -- and she reported that there were only 35 cameras pointed at her, and that "talk to the cameras in New York." Apparently representatives in the Obama campaign in Chicago and the McCain campaign in Phoenix will be interviewed as holograms later in the evening.

It's still unclear who makes this hologram technology, nor how much it costs, nor how exactly it works -- nor when I'm going to get it in my house. Man, and I was just getting used to Skype video chat. Still, scope out the video below.

At the risk of being a bit premature, I decided to poke around the Internet to find what tunes I could spin to spice up my Obama victory party tonight. After consulting Wired, About.com and this massive list on YouTube, I've come up with my Top 10 Obama songs:

1) Mariachi Aguilas de Mexico - Viva Obama

This is without a doubt the best Obama song that I've seen so far. It's got catchy lyrics -- Viva Obama! -- snappy outfits, a line about healthcare, and that female violin player? Muy caliente!

2) Extra Golden - Obama

This half Kenyan band (just like Obama!) rock out on this chillaxed benga track. Great guitar riffs.

3) Cocoa Tea - Barack Obama

Jamaican reggae star Coco Tea recorded this tune earlier this year, earning a small writeup in the Jamaica Observer at the time.

As he told the newspaper:

"If you notice, Obama is getting a lot of support from the young people, and when the younger generation begin to call for change, it usually comes, as they and the future, and Obama's future is in their hands. Support for Obama is also coming from other quarters including the Kennedy family, as he is seen as the man with a plan, therefore I was guided by Jah on this one."

How can you argue with Jah?

4) Docta Musica WashiWara - Barack Obama

This tune comes to us from Cameroon, and if you believe what the Docta says on his Web site: "The video has quickly becomed a big hit on Youtube." Indeed.

5) crbballgal - BARACK THE VOTE!

How can I deny two fly girls, an '80s-style synth, and rapping in front of a bathroom mirror? Well done, ladies.

6) Mighty Sparrow - Barack the Magnificent

Mighty Sparrow is the world's leading calypso singer, hailing from the island of Grenada. Cop a read on the lyrics over here -- I'm sure this is the first time that the phrase "Foreign Relations Committee" has worked its way into a calypso song.

7) Obama Song Spanish Reggaeton

I'm not sure who wrote this song, but nothing makes me want to sing "Si se puede!" louder than this reggaeton tune.

8) Bruce Springsteen - Working on a Dream

This song debuted just two days ago at a rally in Cleveland, so if you drop this joint at your fiesta, you'll definitely be about 75 percent as cool as the Boss himself.

9) Barackapella - Yes We Can

Although college a capella may get mocked on Stuff White People Like, this cover of the famed will.i.am song is perfectly pulled off by Barackapella, a group from Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. (Also, don't forget the parody, by john.he.is!)

10) Guru - Obama dance mix

I really, really hope that this is the first song that the Obamas dance to at the inagural ball. Or at least at the party in Chicago tonight.

CBS screen shot

If you're like me, you're going to spend Election Night pretty much glued to the Internet, waiting for news to pop up wherever it might -- on Twitter, blogs, YouTube and, yes, that good ol' stalwart, the mainstream media. Usually I don't watch television, but there are a few instances -- like today -- when I actually do want to watch something like CNN with the graphics, the analysis, the whole shebang. Further, I'm abroad, so it's not like I can simply hop over to my local bar to watch election results (here's a handy map showing when the polls close). So where can I go to watch live coverage online?

CNN is offering live coverage here and here. I've also found CBS's coverage to be working well so far -- as of this writing, CBS has a camera trained (sans commentary) on a gym in Chicago where Obama is voting. (See photo at top.)

Oh yeah, and don't forget about the ever-reliable C-SPAN.

Apparently ABC and MSNBC will be offering live coverage online as well, but I haven't been able to find the respective sites yet.

There's also this gray-market online streaming site, Channel Chooser, which offers both American channels and foreign ones, including BBC, France 24, Al Jazeera English and Sky News Australia.

Alley Insider has a bunch of live feeds from the McCain and Obama camps and some conservative Christian groups as well.

For live radio coverage, there's NPR and CBC.

The New York Times has built a neat little election dashboard that updates every two minutes, and Google has gotten in on the action with its own map-based results page.

And finally, of course, there's Salon's own coverage.

Happy voting!

The French seem to be all over all kinds of new, far-reaching digital policy.

First, the French Senate "voted overwhelmingly" (297-15) late last week to create a sort of digital three strikes law, which after the third strike, would cut people off from the Internet. It's not entirely clear how a law like this would be enforced, especially considering the fact that people can access the Internet from home, from their workplace, and also from free, public Wi-Fi hot spots, not to mention at other locations such as a public library.

The bill now heads to the French National Assembly for final approval.

But, as the BBC reported this morning:

If enacted, the law will put France on a collision course with Brussels, which rejected a call to impose such "three strikes" laws across Europe in April 2008.

Throwing people offline, it said, conflicted with "civil liberties and human rights".

Second, late last month Eric Besson, a Sarkozy cabinet minister in charge of the "development of the digital economy," presented a new 81-page Digital Plan 2012 for France, which apparently was one of Sarkozy's presidential campaign promises.

If enacted, this would be one of the most ambitious technological policy plans in Western Europe in recent years. (And while I don't mean to harp on Estonia, the Baltic powerhouse has had a few of these items, like digital ID cards and health records, for some time now.)

Among other things, the report says that "high-speed Internet," like water and electricity , is "essential." And as such, 2 million to 4 million French citizens are without it -- and the government needs to work such that by 2010, every single citizen has 512 kbps that costs no more than 35 euros per month. Further, every French citizen should have access to high-speed mobile Internet as well, which only covers 85 percent of the citizenry as of today.

Other proposals include:

- allowing the old analog television signals to be opened up to wireless and mobile Internet access.

- an electronic national identity card for each citizen starting in 2009 (Estonia already has this).

- a doubling of cyber-crime law enforcement agents by 2012

- the promotion of telecommuting in the public sector

- a digital medical file for each citizen by 2012

- a Green IT and Cleantech prize

- a migration away from the American-dominated ICANN toward a more multilateral and international organization to run the infrastructure of the Internet.

As of yet, this remains but a proposal -- but an interesting and ambitious one -- and if Sarkozy is serious about keeping his campaign promise, especially while France holds the the Presidency of the Council of the European Union until the end of the year, it could be a boon to France.

Probably the best thing I read this weekend was the fact that Sarah Palin got pranked in a call by the Montreal comedy duo Les justiciers masqués (the Masked Avengers). The call, which goes on for nearly seven minutes, is full of French and French Canadian references, all of which are lost on the hapless governor -- and apparently on the Washington Post, which failed to translate some of the best parts of the joke. Fortunately for you guys, my French skills and the Internet helped me figure out the rest.

Thanks to the Globe and Mail for a fuller, and more accurate, transcript than the one provided by CTV via the Washington Post -- which, however, included the first few seconds in its transcript.

Around 0:04:

RADIO HOST: Hi, this is (French name), I am with president Sarkozy, on the line for Gov. Palin.

The actual name used was "Franc Ouvrier" -- which means Frank Worker -- as in generic French worker.

Anyway, back to the Globe and Mail's transcript:

Around 1:00:

A: I follow your campaigns closely with my special American adviser Johnny Hallyday, you know?

Johnny Hallyday, as anyone who's ever taken a French class or traveled to France ought to know, is France's biggest aging rock star, who sings in French, but in a "yeah-yeah" (or, in French, yé-yé), America circa 1950s-influenced style. According to the BBC, Hallyday supported Sarkozy in the 2007 French presidential election.

Around 2:05:

A: Exactly, we could try go hunting by helicopter like you did. I never did that. Like we say in French, on pourrait tuer des bebe phoques, aussi.

"Le phoque" is the French word for seal, and comedically, it sounds a lot like the English word "fuck."

So the sentence in French means: "We could go kill baby seals, too."

Around 2:50:

That's the thing that I said to my great friend, the prime minister of Canada Stef Carse.

As the governor of a state that borders Canada, you'd think that Palin would know that the prime minister of Canada is actually Stephen Harper. Also, Stef Carse is a famous Quebecois country singer.

Around 3:10:

A: I was wondering because you are so next to him, one of my good friends, the prime minister of Quebec, Mr. Richard Z. Sirois, have you met him recently? Did he come to one of your rallies?

Richard Z. Sirois is one of the co-hosts of Audette and Trudel's radio show, "Les Cerveaux de l'info," on CKOI-FM in Montreal.

Also, while to an American ear the "prime minister of Quebec" sounds obviously false, the Masked Avengers' Wikipedia page notes:

Although the term they used was in fact "Prime Minister of Quebec," this is merely an atypical usage and not an inherently incorrect or deliberately misleading one. While Canadian English has a usage convention of reserving the title "Prime Minister" for the Prime Minister of Canada and using "Premier" for the equivalent position in a province or territory, in their actual meanings the terms are strictly interchangeable. Furthermore, Canadian French does not have separate words for the two positions, using premier ministre for both -- accordingly, when speaking English, Canadian francophones will often refer to the prime minister of a province.

Around 4:05:

A: Yes, in French it's called de rouge a levre sur un cochon, or if you prefer in English, Joe the Plumber ... it's his life, Joe the Plumber.

"Rouge à sur un cochon" means "lipstick on a pig."

Around 5:02:

A: Gov. Palin, I love the documentary they made on your life. You know Hustler's Nailin' Paylin?

This, of course, is a reference to the recent porn film "Nailin' Paylin."

The pranksters then let Gov. Palin in on the joke and she promptly hung up on them.

The Masked Avengers have their own official YouTube channel, but don't have some of their other famous pranks, including this call with the real President Sarkozy. These guys have also pulled off pranks against Bill Gates, Britney Spears and former French President Jacques Chirac.

I wasn't able to find links to online audio for those calls but would love to hear them. Anyone else able to locate them? Merci d'avance!

In what surely would have been really useful after Halloween, a new British start-up, Media Metrica, is going to release high-tech trash bins all over London next year. The bins will be both bomb-proof (London of course, removed trash bins on the Underground following an IRA bombing in 1991, and then the rest of public bins two years later after more bombings) and will have built-in weatherproof LCD screens to display the latest news (presumably connected wirelessly to the Internet).

The bins apparently are made of steel, which reduces the impact of an explosion, by absorbing shrapnel and the heat of the explosion.

According to various British newspapers, the City of London and Media Metrica have a 15-year agreement to install 50 trash bins (each with two screens) around the city, in exchange for operating the information channel (upon which the company can likely run advertising). Otherwise, the units apparently cost  about $50,000 each -- plus, they weigh about a ton -- so they're probably not going to be in your neighborhood anytime soon.

The company, which has been testing the bins for the last five years in the New Mexico desert, also plans to bring them to other financial centers around the world, including New York and Dubai.

The Times of London also reports today that "[t]he units will include recycling compartments, allowing pedestrians to deposit newspapers, cans and bottles. With 30 million tonnes of litter collected every year and more than £600 million a year spent in measures to clean up Britain, there is concern about the lack of rubbish receptacles."

While Londoners must be appreciative of finally having trash bins in public where they didn't before, I do wonder how green a bin with electronics attached actually will be and how that in and of itself will be recycled. The London Evening Standard reported last year that the plastic casing is made of "recycled materials," but beyond that it's not clear what exactly that means.

Over here in the US, a 5-year-old company called BigBelly Solar already makes a $4,000 solar-powered trash bin that compacts garbage once it's reached a certain level. They're currently in use outside San Diego, Greater Vancouver, and even at Fenway Park in Boston.

Still, as much as I love teched-out stuff, maybe just simple plastic bins are the way to go.

For all you non-Californians out there, there's one big state proposition that tech people seem to care about -- Proposition 8, which would make gay marriage illegal in California, despite the fact that the California Supreme Court declared gay marriage legal earlier this year.

Not surprisingly, a couple of big Silicon Valley companies have come out against the measure, including Google and, most recently, Apple. But in a big print ad in the San Jose Mercury News today, a bunch of tech leaders are putting their name to opposing this proposition. There's also a related Facebook group. (In related news, the Wall Street Journal reported that the No on Proposition 8 Web site was hit by a cyberattack yesterday.)

These include David Filo (founder of Yahoo), Chuck Geschke (founder of Adobe Systems), John Morgridge (former CEO of Cisco), Jack Dorsey (chairman of Twitter), Sheryl Sandberg (COO, Facebook), Michael Moritz (Sequoia Capital) and many others.

While defeating Proposition 8 is important -- I will be voting no -- I'd love to see Silicon Valley get equally behind Proposition 1A (the one to create a California high-speed rail system) with a similar public promotion campaign; after all, the Merc endorsed it. Further, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute recently authored a study arguing that the rail system will create nearly 50,000 permanent jobs in the Bay Area alone and over 100,000 during the construction period.

Another tech-related ballot measure, Proposition 7, which would mandate government-owned utilities to generate 20 percent of their electricity from renewable energy by 2010, and then to 40 percent by 2020 and 50 percent by 2025, is being opposed by local newspapers and the Union of Concerned Scientists, and many renewable energy companies. The state Democratic and Republican parties are against it as well, as is the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Why?

Reports the Christian Science Monitor:

Prop. 7 is a dangerous anomaly, say several key observers, because it is well meaning, but incompetently written.

"This was put together by a firm with no experience in this industry with political consultants whose only focus was to write a title and summary that made it appealing to voters," says V. John White, director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, a nonprofit research and advocacy group in Sacramento.

"This is a very complicated initiative on top of existing state law which is not meeting its goals because of flaws," says Mr. White. "They should have asked for help and didn't. They made several unintentional mistakes because of the way they drafted it."

In short -- my endorsements? Yes on Proposition 1A, no on 7 and 8.

[Hat tip: Farhad Manjoo]

The Internet is full of examples of "crowdsourcing" -- that is, taking the "wisdom" of the masses and using it to apply knowledge in a particular direction. There are crowdsourced encyclopedias, journalism, commercials and, heck, T-shirt designs. But what about laptops?

Yesterday, Intel and Asus announced a new site, WePC.com, which allows anyone to contribute ideas on how to build a new laptop. You submit a written description of a computer that you'd like to see built, and if enough people like the idea and vote favorably for it, Intel will power it and Asus will build it.

In  flipping through the site, I saw a few ideas I like: "light manipulating LCD screen to give a clear image in all light environment," or a LowJack PC. But some of the ideas are a bit out-there, like a laptop with a built-in scanner and photo printer. Neat, but honestly, how practical (not to mention expensive) would a computer like this actually be?

I guess my gut reaction is that with so many in the crowd contributing ideas, wouldn't this quickly turn into the hardware version of too many cooks in the kitchen? I can foresee how this could easily turn into the Dr. Frankenstein computer, with weird features and appendages that cost $5,000 -- something that no one wants, and no one would buy. In other words, this machine could be the exact opposite of any Apple computer.

To be sure, I checked in with my buddy David Cohn, a cheerleader for crowdsourcing, and the founder of Spot.us, an upcoming crowd-funded journalism site.

"There are some things you don't want crowdsourced," he admitted in an IM interview.

"Brain surgery, for example -- if I'm going to have brain surgery done to me, I'd prefer a single doctor over a roomful of smart people any day of the week. Same with flying a plane: I'll take the pilot. It's hard to know what things require experts and what can benefit from crowdsourcing -- because without a doubt the crowd does do some things better. Design can be one of them -- but I think in the end you need somebody at the steering wheel. It's hard to tell what the organization of this will be like from the press release. If they go with an InnoCentive model -- all suggestions welcome, but only one solution is picked -- then it'll work."

Indeed, that seems to be the approach this contest is taking. Intel and Asus say there will be prizes "announced at a later date."

Still, I'm curious to see if any of these crowdsourced machines will actually get built and will sell in any respectable quantity.

[via John Battelle's Searchblog]

Earlier this week Microsoft announced that it would be moving its Office suite of applications -- you know, Word, PowerPoint and Excel -- to the Web. This is part of a larger trend of tech companies moving stuff off individual computers and onto what's known in the industry as "the cloud," which is just a fancy way of saying that the programs exist online. With ubiquitous connectivity via laptops and mobile phones, all of that data becomes accessible all the time. Google Docs and all of its related applications (Reader, Gmail, etc.) are obviously cloud-based, as is Apple's Mobile Me syncing system.

While it's pretty clear how this is useful in a business-type situation, I don't think I'll be transitioning to using entirely Web-based apps anytime soon. Heck, even with Gmail around, I still prefer to download my e-mail the old-fashioned way, using a POP3 mail client (I roll with Thunderbird). And I'll keep doing my writing in a similar fashion, pounding out my words on a no-frills text editor to just get my words out onto the page, and in Microsoft Word for serious formatting, line editing and spell checking.

The thing about using offline programs that don't require a network connection to maintain is that they're responsive and easy to use. I can be anywhere and draft an e-mail, just like I can be anywhere and put words to a screen. I don't have to worry about whether other people on the network I'm using are hogging all the bandwidth by downloading BitTorrent files. Even in the age of Internet access from just about every corner of the country, not to mention the globe (I'm blogging this week from a rural village in Corsica), there are still places and moments when you have a slow connection at best, or none at all. Using Gmail on a slow connection is simply painful. Trying to edit a large document in a similar environment will be too.

Further, your computer (or heck, your iPhone) has much more power -- because there's only one person using it at a time (you) -- than any cloud-based service ever will. The response time between my keyboard and my text editor will always be faster than the response time between my keyboard, Google Docs and its servers and then back to my eyeballs.

Plus, I want control of my data, e-mails and documents alike. I want to be responsible for them, and despite Google's best intentions, don't want my messages subject to subpoena. My e-mails stay on my computer, and I'm the only one who has access to it, and that's just how I like it.