I spent nearly my entire weekend (night and day) extracting, preparing, encoding, and uploading digital video. I am happy to say that the ordeal is mostly over and I’m very excited about the result.
I know what a bad feeling it is to go into the voting booth and to look at empty names, with no idea who they are or what they want to accomplish other than what I can assume from their party affiliation. So, as part of my volunteer efforts for Citizens’ Resource we now have short, online video presentations by nearly all of the candidates that will appear in contested races on the Utah County ballot available on Google video.
Hopefully all of you will take advantage of email, blogs, and the word-of-mouth power of “viral marketing” to help as many people view these videos as possible before voting on November 7th.
In the Republican Primary elections back in June, I had my first experience voting using Utah County’s new electronic voting machines. The process itself was smooth and voting using the machines was easy to understand and even pleasant.
However, my experience as a computer programmer has taught me a healthy distrust of technology and of people using technology.
Implementing proper security in any system takes an exceptional amount of effort, and even then, hackers are unbelievably resourceful and will often find ways to infiltrate the system despite a well implemented security process. What a lot of people unfamiliar with the topic don’t realize is that hackers excel at not only software engineering, but at what we call Social Engineering, or manipulating people using their expectations of technology.
Paul Taylor writes:
Paul Taylor
County Delegate, OR16I have watched with growing dismay as screeds have been flung about on blogs, mailing lists and web sites accusing Parley Hellewell of dirty campaigning. My dismay has been both with the tone and approach of the accusers, and with the question of whether they are right. I have spoken at length with Parley to get his view on the matter, which I will share below. I will follow my reporting of that conversation with my own editorializing—please note the separation! I am not representing Parley or his campaign. I have decided to vote for Parley, I’ve stated this publicly, and I reaffirm it now.
I told Parley that I intended to disseminate what I learned from our conversation. I did not record the conversation word-for-word, so I will not quote his answers directly.
