Irvu writes "The US House of Representatives is considering HR. 5036, the 'Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008,' as introduced by Representative Rush Holt. The bill is scheduled for a floor vote later today. It would provide for emergency paper ballots, money for the addition of voter verifiable paper ballots to existing systems, and post-election audits. Crucially, the change to paper is opt-in, making it possible for local jurisdictions to govern their own choices. Here are two summaries of the bill. It was reported out of committee with strong bipartisan support. As of this morning the White house has opposed the bill but not threatened a veto, and some previously supportive Republicans have now changed their tune. Calls may be made to your house rep (click on 'Find your representative'). Here's a sample support letter."

Pioneer Woman writes "Abdul Rahman Dahlan, secretary general of the United Malays National Organization party's youth wing, said all those vying for national youth posts must have blogs to introduce themselves and their programs ahead of party elections in December. The decision appeared aimed at countering heavy losses that the ruling National Front coalition suffered in last month's general elections. In a country where mainstream media is tightly controlled by the government they underestimated the power of online campaigning. In the past, party politicians have said bloggers spread lies and rumors but now even youth deputy Khairy Jamaluddin — who once compared bloggers to monkeys living by the law of the jungle — has a blog."

You asked questions about Skewz.com on April 2nd and April 3rd. Here are your answers. This media bias stuff is tricky to deal with. Both Skewz and Microsoft's Blewz are trying, anyway. Skewz people say they want to jump into the conversation attached to this post, so if you have any follow-up questions please feel free to ask them.

MrJones writes "In Paraguay we are at T-9 days to national elections. The ruling party has been in power for nearly 61 years (including more than 30 years of dictatorship). Now the state-run ADSL company is hijacking the DNS nationwide of a site that denounces the corruption in the party."

hhavensteincw writes "The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is coming under fire for a new policy to stop the "harvesting" of a digital snapshot of all federal agency and Congressional Web sites after every Presidential and Congressional term. NARA, which archived more than 75 million Web sites in 2004 after George Bush's first term ended, will not harvest agency and Congressional Web sites when his current term is over because it says agencies are supposed to be archiving Web content on their own. But NARA has been criticized by some for opting out of preserving these important historical archives on the Web."

QuantumG writes "In a recent article on The Space Review, Greg Zsidisin reveals that Barack Obama plans to delay Project Constellation for at least five years, using the redirected funds to nationalize early-education for children under five years old to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten and beyond, if he is elected president. It is feared that if this happens the Vision for Space Exploration will flounder and that may be the end of human spaceflight altogether."

YouTube has promised a commercial-free zone in the near future to help Congress deal with the problem of hosting campaign videos that were technically breaking the rule of not redirecting constituents to a commercial site. "Within a month, the one and only responder, YouTube, should have its commercial-free zone up and running, Capuano said. Republicans on the commission still fret that with only one such site, the House could be seen as picking winners and losers on the Web. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), another commission member, said the panel's Republicans want to keep the new rules fluid enough to use any future Web site that comes forward with a better plan. 'Technology moves fast. Congress moves slow,' he said."

OrochimaruVoldemort writes "In an unexpected move, Microsoft has disclosed 14,000 pages of coding secrets. According to The Register: 'This is Microsoft's latest effort to satisfy anti-trust concerns of the European Union, which is possibly a tougher adversary for the company than Google.' The article mentioned that this will be done in three phases. 'Between now and June it will garner feedback from the developer community. Then, at the end of June, Microsoft will publish the final versions of technical documentation — along with definitive patent licensing terms.' Lets just hope those terms are pro open source."

modemac writes "Sacramento, California Assemblyman Charles Calderon wants to expand a 75-year-old sales tax on 'tangible personal property' to include music downloads from iTunes and other music-download sites. The tax would specifically apply to music downloads, but the estimate used in this article for revenue generated by 'Net downloading also "includes pornography downloads." The measure, AB 1956, will be considered on Monday, April 14th."

An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that noted encryption pioneer Prof. Martin Hellman has a new passion; estimating the risk of our current nuclear weapons policies. His web site, Defusing the Nuclear Threat, asks the question, 'How risky are nuclear weapons? Amazingly, no one seems to know.' Hellman therefore did a preliminary analysis and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.' The web site and a related statement therefore urgently call for more detailed studies to either confirm or correct his startling conclusion. The statement has been signed by seven notable individuals including former NSA Director Adm. Bobby R. Inman and two Nobel Laureates."

Lucas123 writes "Attorney General Michael Mukasey claims that terrorists sell pirated software as a way to finance their operations, without presenting a shred of evidence for his case. He's doing it to push through a controversial piece of intellectual property legislation that would increase IP penalties, increase police power, set up a new agency to investigate IP theft, and more. 'Criminal syndicates, and in some cases even terrorist groups, view IP crime as a lucrative business, and see it as a low-risk way to fund other activities,' Mukasey told a crowd at the Tech Museum of Innovation last week."

Timothy found a profile in The New Republic of Jonathan Schilling, a 53-year-old software developer from New Jersey who works to keep Hillary Clinton's Wikipedia entry clean and fair throughout the election season. "After he started editing her page in June 2005, Schilling became consumed with trying to capture her uncomfortable place in American culture, researching and writing a whole section on how she polarizes the public... [T]he attacks on Hillary's page mainly take the form of crude vandalism... It's different on Obama's page, where the fans — no surprise — are more enthusiastic, the haters are more intelligent, and the arguments reflect the fact that Obama himself is still a work under construction... The bitterness of the fights on Obama's page could be taken as a bad sign for the candidate. But it may actually be Hillary's page that contains the more troubling omens. Few, if any, Hillary defenders are standing watch besides Schilling. In recent days, the vaguely deserted air of a de-gentrifying neighborhood has settled over her page..."

Stanislav_J writes "All you wealthy Slashdotters better start making alternate arrangements for stashing your millions. Switzerland's storied role as discreet banker to the world's tax-avoiding wealthy is under threat like never before, and this time the country ultimately may not be able to stop the rest of the world from prying into those legendary 'secret' accounts, said to contain between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. A massive German tax-evasion scandal is putting pressure on the Swiss to cooperate, and the rest of Europe is also hardening their resolve to force change upon them. Per the article, 'The official Swiss reaction has been self-conscious detachment, which they hope will deflate the issue,' but even their own citizens are not too concerned about those outside their borders: 80% of Swiss support the banking confidentiality law, but that number drops into the 40s when it is applied to foreigners. Pressure is also coming from US pols — not the 'let's pry into everyone's business' Republicans, but the 'make the rich pay their fair share' Democrats, including Illinois Senator (and presidential candidate) Barack Obama."

eWeekPete writes "Is the pipe half full or half empty? Not surprisingly, the talk at the second annual Tech Policy Summit was decidedly mixed. 'The US is still the most dynamic broadband economy in the world,' said Ambassador Richard Russell, the associate director of the White House's Office on Science and Technology Policy. 'As opposed to being miles ahead, though, we're only a little ahead.' But Yale Law School's Susan Crawford called Russell's position 'magical thinking. We're not doing well at all.' She proceeded to call the White House's effort 'completely inadequate on broadband competition.'"

michuk writes "IBM's representative for KT182 (the committee empowered to vote on OOXML in Poland) accused the committee's chair of intentionally manipulating the process. A letter from the president of the body overseeing KT182, sent a month ago to the committee chair for distribution to all committee members, was never distributed. The letter recommended that, if consensus were not achieved on the OOXML vote, then Poland should abstain. This follows up my recent report on the OOXML process in Poland (also covered by Groklaw), it looks like things are going bad this time, at least as bad as in October." The EU is already investigating the Polish process based on complaints last fall. Is anyone tracking all of the allegations and investigations surrounding OOXML?

Ian Lamont writes "Google is in the midst of a full-court privacy effort in Washington that involves pushing consumer privacy legislation in U.S. Congress, reaching out to privacy advocates in an effort to allay concerns about its acquisition of DoubleClick, and working with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to 'fine-tune online advertising principles' that the agency proposed last year. Google has been under fire in Washington in recent years — the FTC investigated the Google/DoubleClick deal and the EFF has issued warnings over Google services in the past. Is Google being sincere about these issues, or is this effort mostly paying lip service to its 'do no evil' policy and an attempt to head off future clashes with policy makers?"

First to submit writes "Ars Technica analyzes the Patent Reform Act that has passed the House and is being debated in the Senate. Unfortunately for those longing for real, meaningful patent reform, the bill comes up short in some significant ways. 'Despite the heated rhetoric on both sides, it is unclear if the legislation will do much to fix the most serious flaws in the patent system. A series of appeals court rulings in the 1990s greatly expanded patentable subject matter, making patents on software, business methods, and other abstract concepts unambiguously legal for the first time.'"

An anonymous reader writes in with news that China has unblocked the BBC Web site — the English-language version at any rate. No announcement was made, because China has never acknowledged blocking the BBC for the last decade. The Chinese-language version of the site has been blocked since its inception in 1999. The article speculates that the easing of censorship may be tied to the upcoming Olympic Games.

antipeon alerts us to a presidential preference survey, done in late February and early March, indicating that Obama and McCain lead among IT workers with 29% each. Clinton follows with 13%, just ahead of Huckabee (11%) and Ron Paul (9%). The Computing Technology Industry Association commissioned the poll, and the article notes that this trade group claims the population of IT workers is four times as large as the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks it is — the better to make a voting block whose views must be attended to.

wanderindiana brings us an update on the White House missing emails mess, which we have discussed before. It seems the hard drives of many White House computers are gone beyond the possibility of recovery. Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy? "Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005. The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed."