Technology Futures

A North Carolina judge has jumped hard on Diebold, the leading manufacturer of electronic voting machines. This issue is a state law that correctly requires voting machine manufacturers to escrow (provide) all of the code used in a voting machine so that it can be audited by an independent third party.

Diebold uses Microsoft Windows as the underlying operating system in the machines, and says it is not allowed by Microsoft to provide the Windows source code. Diebold has now threatened not to sell their machines in North Carolina.

It is bad enough that Diebold has based the company's machines on a proprietary operating system, but worse still that the company thinks it does not have to be accountable. Voting is one of the fundamental lynchpins of the republic; without honest and auditable voting processes, as a country, we are at huge risk.

Diebold should have anticipated all this when the machines were still on the drawing boards, and the fact that they thought their approach was adequate is worrisome. What other time bombs are ticking away in the machines?

How should they have done it? There are plenty of open source (i.e. easily auditable) operating systems that could have been used to power the machines. Or they could have easily written their own--it's not like entering some names, displaying buttons, and counting the number of times a button is pushed is rocket science.

North Carolina should toss the machines out and sue Diebold. Anything else puts our country at risk.

This short Register article highlights the urgency of dealing with the cable redundancy issue. Communities that do not have a plan to ensure at least two separate broaband cable paths (also referred to as backhaul or Internet feeds) in and out of a community are at risk of losing local businesses to places that do provide cable redundancy. High tech companies are leaving Iceland because the tiny country has only one primary fiber cable serving the entire island, and the cable has been damaged several times, leaving local companies high and dry, so to speak.

Also in the article is a note that residents of Greenland, with a population lower than many U.S. counties and rural regions, will be getting "super fast" ADSL2+, which runs at 24 megabits. According to my arithmetic, this is much faster than the "super fast" 7 megabit DSL that Verizon is touting here in the States.

Okay, here's my updated economic development slogan; feel free to use it in your region.

Our region--broadband almost as good as Greenland!

Skype has announced a deal with Radio Shack to have the electronics retailer sell Skype-ready phones and headsets.

The old Betamax-VHS battle is a reminder that the best technology does not always win. Skype uses proprietary (free) software, which is good for Skype but is not necessarily a good choice over the long term for consumers, as it does not interoperate with Open Source-based software and voice protocols. Skype locks you in to using their software.

But what Skype has is an early lead and the potential to force the marketplace into making Skype a de facto standard.

One of the troubling issues is the potential disaggregation of the telephone service market. We may need multiple telephone numbers....a cellphone number, a Skype number, a landline number, an Open Source SIP number. This could all turn out to be a big mess and a major headache. As the business market for telephone service evaporates--meaning no one can make any money selling phone service--the unified, worldwide, call anywhere and receive calls from anywhere phone system may just fall apart.

There is one bright spot--the Internet geeks have been working on this problem for several years, and the ENUM registry promises a quick and easy way to make the phone number problem minimal. But companies like Skype may not want to use an open standard that helps level the playing field for competitors.

Skeptics of the Energy Economy tend to hang their hat (with some justification) on the fact that hydrogen is hard to transport and hard to store. But even while there are emerging technologies that may address those twin problems, there are increasing signs that it may not be important.

I wrote recently about the add-on device being used by truckers to generate hydrogen on the fly from water; the hydrogen is injected into the engine cylinders to increase fuel mileage and as a side benefit, create drastic reductions in pollution.

A Florida engineer has developed a similar system that also uses electrolysis to split water atoms, but instead of throwing the oxygen away, he combines the hydrogen atoms and the oxygen atom to create a new gas with a chemical composition of HHO (instead of H2O).

The new kind of gas has some remarkable properties, including more efficient metalcutting. The gas is presently undergoing certification for use in welding and metalworking shops and factories.

But if you bolt the device onto the side of a car engine and use some electricity from the alternator to power it, you can apparently get a 30% increase in fuel mileage at a cost of about 70 cents an hour. Since an hour of driving is going to consume somewhere between two and three gallons of gas at a cost of $4-$8, this system is a real winner if it works the way it is claimed.