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In this Japanese EMobile ad, a monkey politician stands before a crowd chanting and holding up signs calling for change. Yes, that’s right, a fucking monkey standing in for Obama is selling phones in Japan. I guess it’s to be expected coming from a country that thinks blackface is hilarious, but seriously— this is pretty ridiculous. [Animal NY via Boing Boing Gadgets]
Filed under: Cellphones
We’re a bit frightened by the fact that high-ranking political officials are told to leave their BlackBerrys outside in an unguarded basket during high-level meetings (really, it’s “common practice”), but nevertheless, one chap who tried to take advantage of the situation didn’t quite make it out undiscovered. During a recent political meetup in New Orleans, a Mexican press attaché managed to slip a half dozen or so BlackBerrys into his pocket before darting to the airport with visions of black market markups in his head. Before he could exit the country, however, Secret Service had tracked him down after catching him via surveillance footage. As it stands, the responsible individual has been fired from his post, but there’s been no word on whether the US will take any further actions. Reevaluating the whole “leaving them out in the open” practice may be a good start — just sayin’.
[Via The Boy Genius Report]
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A group of hackers has captured the fingerprints of the German Interior Minister as a protest against plans to use biometric data in e-passports. The latest edition of their magazine, Die Datenschleuder, contains a plastic foil that reproduces the whorls and swirls of Wolfgang Schauble’s digit, meaning there are 4,000 copies of the politician’s prints just waiting to be attached to someone’s finger. More below.
The CCC got its hands on Schauble’s prints thanks to a sympathiser, who scarpered with a glass used by the minister during a panel discussion and handed it over to the hackers. Dirk Engling, a spokesman for CCC, defended the group’s actions, claiming it was a warning shot, and that fingerprints “certainly
[did] not [belong] in the e-Pass.”
Along with Minister Schauble’s fingerprint, the group also published a wish-list of other politicians whose biometric data they’d like to get their mitts on—including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the Prime Minister of Bavaria, Guenther Beckstein—as well as a guide on how to capture someone’s fingerprints from a glass successfully.
The lawyer hired by the CCC sees it like this: “If journalists and citizens were to do what the government is doing—that is, the collection and use of biometric data—then the prosecutor would be knocking at their doors.” Meanwhile, a po-faced spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry, refused to rule out legal action against the fingerprint-stealing hackers. [Heise online via Slashdot]
Great news for democracy! It looks like some voter fraud went down in Ohio, with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation seizing voting machines for forensic analysis and a criminal investigation underway.
Apparently, a candidate’s name was marked as withdrawn on a number of voting machines and the internal audit capability on the machines had been manually disabled by election board programmers, which is pretty shady. And Ohio doesn’t exactly have a great record when it comes to voting.
Two Cuyahoga election officials were convicted of rigging a recount in May 2004 because they literally admitted to doing precounts and displayed the evidence while being recorded on videotape. A different Cuyahoga county recount, for a November 2007 local election, was equally marred when Brunner turned the state’s voter-verifiable paper audit trail law into a mockery by conducting the recount with paper ballots reprinted after the election from voting machine memory cards.
Boy, this all really makes you trust into our system of government, doesn’t it? In the end, Ohio might end up scrapping the touchscreen machines entirely and going back to paper ballots, a move that would cost the state about $64 million but would keep elections a touch more trustworthy. [Ars Technica]
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Sure, electronic voting has had its fair share of troubles, but there’s not denying that it’s the wave of the future — and we’re always intrigued by plans like the one being floated in Poland right now that would allow citizens to vote online from their homes, since that seems like a great way to increase participation. Of course, some people are just never going to get it, and it looks like former Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski is the latest Luddite curmudgeon to risk your ire, saying that he’s not exactly thrilled with the idea of a “young person sitting in front of a computer, watching video clips and pornography while sipping a bottle of beer and voting when he feels like it.” Kacynski went on to say that as a whole, Internet users are “the easiest group to manipulate, to suggest who to vote for” — which probably means that in addition to not using a cell phone or having a bank account (true!), he’s never actually been on the Internet either. Tell you what, Minister: you come in here and successfully manipulate a Mac vs. PC flamewar, maybe we’ll talk. Deal?
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