agog

What the Media isn’t telling you but you need to know

Dennis Kucinich Albert Howard

To revisit the New Hampshire Digression – How many of you know there is a New Hampshire vote recount taking place right now? Do a google search and try to find out what is going on. You would think there are nothing but wacko conspiracy theorist postings so complete is the absence of coverage. Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign requested and has paid for a Democratic recount. Republican candidate Albert Howard also requested a recount of Republican ballots. What are they finding in New Hampshire four weeks after the election?

State officials were required to audit each voting machine during the election but most failed to do so.

Many Optical ballots were not counted – 550 in one town alone.

Some ballots were not read because voters used the wrong markers.

Memory cards which store the counts from each optical reader for transmission to the central tally machine are missing.

Optical paper ballots themselves, needed for the recount, are missing.

Problems with Diebold voting machines were reported in 21 towns on election night. Details are unknown.

The state is withholding “uncounted” and “spoiled” ballots from the recount against Kucinich’s express request that they be included.

Republican and Democratic ballots are all mixed up slowing down the recount.

Many towns have not send their paper ballots for recounting more than four weeks after the election.

The chain of custody of ballots is so flawed there is no way to verify that the ballots being recounted by hand are the same as those actually counted by the machines in the election. It is easy to imagine a bunch of folk in a back room busily marking ballots today trying to generate a set to match those machine counts.

Counters are slow, leading to speculation that they intentionally exhausted the money provided before finishing.

Counting was suspended in the Democratic recount when the initial funding ran out in the first week of the recount after the first two towns showed up 4% to 10% errors (In favor of Hillary).

This somehow all seems worthy of coverage and something all citizens need to and are entitled to know.
Rich Holt has introduced a national bill required paper ballots but as New Hampshire is showing very clearly, paper ballots alone will not fix the problems in voting.

Everything you thought you didn’t need to know about PC networking and broadband Internet (Beware of Firewalls)

We are a two PC household who were early adapters of cable broadband Internet. Cox wants $8 for each extra PC so we set up one PC with a primary Ethernet connection to the cable modem and a second Ethernet connection to the second PC. This setup meant that cox could only see the primary PC. The downside was that the primary PC had to be turned on and working for the second PC to access the Internet. This was done in the dark ages when an Ethernet card cost less than $10 and a router cost a lot.

Cox then upgraded their broadband to tiers of service with 600KB, 1.5MB, and 7MB. Our prices kept going up but we weren’t told that we were now paying for 7MB service which our old modem couldn’t handle. The modem finally went flaky and we got a hold of a helpful technician at Cox who told us we needed a newer modem that was compatible with the newer tiered services. We purchased and installed the new modem ourselves. The technician had told us of Cox’s Las Vegas Data Transfer Test that measures the actual data transfer rates of a broadband connection. We decided to save $20 a month and dropped to the 1.5MB tier.

DLINK EBR-2310

Next, our oldest PC, an IBM, died, taking the hard disk and granddaughters’ pictures and movies with it, so we bought a new HP desktop with a 19 inch LCD monitor with built in speakers for under $500. The new PC came with Microsoft’s Vista Premium operation system. We decided it was time to upgrade our Ethernet setup to a DLINK wired router which can be purchased now for under $20 and allows us multiple PCs with a single Cox connection. Our second PC was running windows 2000 Professional. Getting Vista and Windows 2000 to network was the first major obstacle and I don’t recommend anyone try it. Microsoft’s Internet site is less than helpful, even their developers site and I am a retired professional. The second major obstacle was Vista’s security system. Routers have built in firewalls which you should turn on. Turn off the firewall on your PC. If you don’t the router and PC get into wars.

The new HP computer came with a trial security suite from a major vendor who will remain unnamed. This software went to war with Microsoft immediately, even with the firewall turned off. Dump this software. Cox offers its customers its own security suite supplied to Cox by a major security vendor. Its anti-virus and anti-spy-ware features appear to work well, but turn off its firewall or you’ll be back to the wars again.

I use the HDTV as the monitor for the second PC and wanted to watch instant movies from Netflix. Netflix only supports XP or Vista running Microsoft Explorer so I decided to upgrade the PC to a dual boot Vista Windows 2000 system. Microsoft has grown increasingly paranoid about software piracy and looking for installation help on the Internet is to enter a battleground between Microsoft and its users who the company seem to view as a bunch of hackers and thieves out to break their system and steal their precious flaky software. Hence, the ground keeps shifting and Microsoft now insists on being able to on-line activate (or not or to deactivate an already active system) and monitor your software forever. Its pretty scary knowing that big brother Microsoft may disable your PC at any time at their slightest whim.

After some study on the Internet, I learned that Microsoft is up to new tricks in licensing. They now offer a single machine OEM license at slightly lower prices. The fine print says that once this OEM software is installed, it is wed forever to that particular piece of hardware to the extent that if you change as few as three component peripherals on the PC the software may be disabled. The educational version requires so much proof that you are associated with an educational institution that I wonder anyone tries to buy it. Will Microsoft disable your PC if you change jobs or retire? The Vista Premium upgrade version is available to anyone currently running XP or Windows 2000 Professional (if you are not running the Professional version forget it).

Vista Home Premium Upgrade

Being budget conscious, I purchased a “new” copy of Vista Premium Upgrade on Ebay for $51 (it can retail for up to $200), about the same price as the educational version (pretty stupid huh?). The seller claimed it had never been installed (activated) and PayPal guarantees they will refund your money if you return the product within 7 days. So I received Vista in its original box and set about installing it. I was terrified Microsoft would try to destroy my Windows 2000 Professional (OEM) installation and all its software including my Microsoft Visual Studio .NET while “upgrading”, but I finally figured out how to install Vista on a separate hard drive and get it to leave the Windows 2000 alone. But when I tried to activate Vista online Microsoft refused to do so. I guess maybe the seller had installed and activated Vista before selling it on Ebay. Rather than immediately returning the package, I decided to try Microsoft’s manual activation procedure which involves Microsoft generating a long series of numbers which must be some combination of Vista’s product id and information identifying your specific PC. You then call an operator (in India judging by the Hinglish accent) who you read the numbers to and try to convince you have come by Vista legitimately. Microsoft makes you feel like a criminal out to defraud them. Fortunately, I succeeded, telling her honestly I had purchased Vista on Ebay and she allowed me to activate the software, probably simultaneously deactivating the seller’s copy if he was still using it.

NetGear WGR614

Our son has a new Toshiba laptop computer with Vista premium which a friend tried to connect to Cox Broadband Internet with a refurbished Linksys wireless router. They couldn’t get it to work and I determined that the router had broken once again, so I picked up a NetGear for less than $30. It has the same problem with firewall wars as the Dlink and when I deactivated the Microsoft firewall and removed the trial security software replacing it with Cox’s, the wireless router started working properly and the laptop can be used from anywhere in the house.

The problems with firewalls and security software needs to be highlighted in the installation instructions for routers and PCs. It took awhile and some trial and error to figure out the problems.