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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Thursday, July 01, 2004
Machine Politics
 I've long been vaguely uneasy about electronic voting, but it took today's Boondocks cartoon to turn my concern from a background buzz to a full-throated chorus. No doubt we all know the basics: Diebold sells touch-screen voting systems, on which roughly a third of all America's votes will be cast come November. Diebold's CEO is a big-time Bush fundraiser and pledged to do everything he can to deliver his home state of Ohio to the GOP. Diebold says the software that runs the voting machines -- a trumped up version of Windows -- is proprietary, so there's no independent oversight. There's also no paper trail; you have nothing, no receipt, to prove who you voted for. Academics who got hold of the Diebold code described it as a "trivial" thing to hack into. Unexplained software patches were installed on Diebold machines just before the 2002 election. They were used heavily in Georgia and Florida, both of which showed strong last-minute Republican swings (Jeb Bush was not nearly as safe in the polls as his victory would indicate). All in all, not a list of circumstances likely to generate confidence.
Well, the more I look into it, the queasier I get. The Boondocks is correct: Election Systems and Software of Nebraska, another company filled with Bush fundraisers, sells even more voting machines than Diebold. Its software too is proprietary. Is there anything that would stop a couple of corporate software engineers patching these machines days before the election -- telling them, perhaps, to invalidate one in every 100 Kerry votes? I really, really hoped so, because there's nothing worse than having something like this -- something so vomit-inducingly huge as a stolen election -- on one's "To Worry About" list. So I went and scoured the Diebold and ES&S websites. I wanted to be told not to fret. I wanted to be mollified. I wanted them to protest their innocence of such a charge (here's why it wouldn't work ...). But nothing. Just pictures of well-groomed models using the Tru-Vote, and a handful of Op-Ed pieces from friends in the electronic voting industry; articles that slam the old punch-card machines without adequately explaining why a touch-screen replacement is that much better. Come on guys, humor me: what is to stop a canny Diebold maintenance guy from effectively invalidating the will of the people? How would we ever know?
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