Shortly after September 21st, 2001, more Americans flags began to appear than ever –it was obviously a good idea. It always feels good to ride through the small towns of America on a motorcycle and see an American flag on every house and telephone pole. I decided to attach flags to my motorcycles and found some nice ones at a local hardware store. They lasted for quite a while, but eventually the poor stitching and meager attachment to a wooden stick were bound to fail. One day, I got off the bike and there was a flagpole, but no flag.
I looked around the web a number of times, but was not able to find anything of good quality or correct size until one day when I made a renewed effort and found a website called Pro Pad. They have a wide range of after-market accessories for motorcycles. I was really pleased to find a couple of flags mounted exactly the way I had in mind. The flag posts look like chrome, but they are actually polished stainless steel – and they look very professional. The flags are double-stitched, and attached with a full loop of the flag material. I suspect these will last a very long time.
Speaking of America, one of the many great freedoms we have is the ability to vote. We often don’t think about it, perhaps, and some people don’t take the opportunity, but it is very powerful because it can enable us to determine who our leaders will be and what policies will be followed. Recently it was announced that there will be a pilot of 100,000 people who will be able to vote over the Internet in 2004. This news is, in some respects, the ultimate empowerment that the Internet has in store for us – both in America and around the world. Many people do not vote because it is inconvenient to go out on a rainy day or to drive to the polling place.
There is a system in America for absentee ballots, but it is cumbersome. There are untold errors, delays, and costs associated with this archaic process. We should embrace the Internet voting approach, and urge our political leaders to accelerate testing and investment in technology and implementation. It was very interesting to hear all the naysayers who project the reasons why it will fail. The approach should be to ensure it does not fail. The technology is available – all we need is determination to do the implementation properly. The press today reported that some academics had found flaws in the voting software being offered by one particular company. Good! The headline was about the flaw but the headline should have been that the openness of the Internet enabled researchers to find a flaw so that the company can fix it.
There are always those who feel the glass is half full, and others who feel the glass is half empty. This is certainly the case with digital IDs, digital signatures, Internet voting, and even WiFi. Stories in the Economist and the New York Times have talked about WiFi the same way that many talked about the Web ten years ago. It won’t work, they said. It is insecure, unreliable, non scaleable, has no business model, and has numerous technical “problems”. It seems that some journalists are mostly interested in pointing out the negatives and not the positives. A New York Times story a few weeks ago pointed out that WiFi accesspoints have a security exposure; meaning that if the security features of the WAP are not turned on that someone could connect and potentially gain access to someone else’s information. The story failed to point out that it is a very simple matter to turn the security features *on* so that this can’t happen. It would be really helpful to see more stories in the general and business media about the simple steps people can take to protect themselves more effectively. Creating a sense of alarm and telling the negative side of the story is not particularly helpful and in fact holds back the potential of the technology.