John Borwick’s blog

Will Emigh let me know about Grinnell College’s administrators stopping a web community system. Apparently the administrators raised “legal issues” about something “libelous” on the site, but won’t say what it was. They are gung-ho about quoting the ACM code of ethics…

The students have set up http://www.grinnellplans.com, a renegade off-campus version of their site. Will knows about it this controversy because he was familiar with the Grinnell system… he actually wrote a plans-like system himself on the Benjamin Franklin Scholars server.

I don’t think that they should be quoting the ACM code of ethics in a “listen to us, we know” sort of way. I think the code is meant to encourage reflection and thought, not to justify a holier-than-thou, “these are the rules” approach.

In the Independent Weekly’s jobs list, there’s an ad this week for a “Sous-chef.” Can anyone hook me up?

What is a Sous-chef?

News.com’s article “Voting machine fails inspection” talks about university research done that illustrates that Diebold electronic voting systems are secured poorly. The research was put into question by Diebold, saying that they were not looking at recent versions of their software. Yet, the researchers can’t look at newer versions of the code without signing an NDA.

Let’s not let people run voting servers on-line.