Germany Contributes 100,000 photos to Wikipedia

The German National Archive announced this week that it intends to make eleven million digitized photographs from German history available to Wikipedia for public use. The first 100,000 are already prepared with catalog information, and the others will follow as they are ready. The archive contains photos from pre-Nazi Germany as well as from the Holocaust and the World Wars. Read the article.

China Mandates Linux for Internet Cafes

The Chinese government is mandating that Red Flag Linux be installed in all Internet cafe computers. This move highlights two trends. The first is obviously the expansion of linux as a viable mainstream operating system. The second is a concern by Chinese citizens that the Chinese government may use their linux version to further control and monitor the Internet activities of its citizens. Check out the AP article and visit the Red Flag Linux website.

IBM's Prediction: Five Technologies that Will Change Live in the Next Five Years

IBM's "Five in Five" predictions range from thin-film solar technology that generate economical electricity from asphalt and building surfaces to $200 personal gene maps that identify your personal susceptibility to disease and medical conditions. Check out the short Dr. Dobb's video on all five (there's a brief commercial message in the beginning):  

Major Study Supports Kids' Online Gaming and Social Networking

A three-year UC Irvine study funded by the MacArthur Foundation suggests that online gaming and social networking are beneficial to children by teaching them basic social and technical skills necessary for their futures. Download the full report (PDF) here, or read a brief San Francisco Examiner article describing the study that interviewed hundreds of teenagers and observed thousands of hours of hours of their online activities. The report suggests that a generation gap has prevented school and government leaders from recognizing important benefits of these activities ... activities which many have successsfully banned from school.

The Last Word on 2008 Voting Security

Here's an O'Reilly interview by James Turner of Dr. Barbara Simons, newly-appointed member of the Board of Advisors to the Federal Election Assistance Commission. Dr. Simons in the ONLY computer scientist on the board! The interview presents the perspective of a computer, security, and statistics expert on the current state of technology-assisted voting in the United States. She discusses high-profile state reports that document serious problems with the voting systems sold by major companies (e.g., Diebold), the role of open-source software, and the ways of establishing an easily-auditable paper trail for voting. http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/11/a-2008-e-voting-wrapup-with-dr.html.

Russian Schools Standardize on Open Source Software

The Russian Federation Ministry of Education announced that all Russian school computers will be configured with open source software within one year. If individual schools wish to use commercial software, they will have to purchase it themselves. This dramatic announcement was precipitated when the principal of a Russian school was charged with software piracy after unauthorized copies of Windows were found in his school. If convicted, he would likely have been sentenced to hard labor in a Siberian work camp. Former President Gorbachev appealed to Bill Gates, and then-President Putin declared that a Russian educator would never again be threatened by commercial vs. education conflict. Read a brief article here. This is the largest school system to move to all open source software. They did so after several successful pilot projects. This suggests that it may be a reasonable option for other schools or nations.

Study from Princeton and Lehigh University Researchers Expose Voting Machine Weakness

A slashdot article informs us of a well-researched study from Princeton and Lehigh Universities that exposes many weaknesses in a popular brand of electronic voting machine. Rather than applaud their efforts to strengthen voting security, industry and government officials have attempted to supress their findings. It's an issue that affects entire nations deeply from those that have done it well (Brazil) to those that have done a sadly inadequate job (USA). The article contains several links, including a video showing the evidence of serious security flaws.