Dr. Dobb's Journal February 2004
It seems apropos every now and then to take a second look at topics that seemed important enough to mention in the first place. A score card, if you will, to see how many prognostications I got right and others got wrong. I think that's how it is supposed to work anyway.
For instance, in October 1994, I suggested that that year's elections may well be remembered as the "year computers began to have an impact on the electoral process." In part, this observation was based on a MacWorld poll that indicated electronic voting was the number one capability people wanted from their online access.
Okay, it's nearly 10 years a later and we're not there yet—but we're getting closer. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (http://fecweb1.fec.gov/hava/law_ext.txt) is now law and promises almost $4 billion to states for purchasing computer-based voting machines (touch-screen, and otherwise). The entire state of Georgia, for instance, has moved to e-voting, as have individual counties in Maryland, California, Florida, and elsewhere.
As you'd expect, all this e-voting activity has not been without controversy on technical, ethical, and legal fronts. The leading contenders for e-voting bucks—Sequoia Voting Systems and Diebold Election Systems—are scrambling for their share of the $4 billion pie. However, computer scientist (and DDJ author) Avi Rubin purports to have uncovered security flaws in Diebold's proprietary AccuVote-TS voting system (see http://avirubin.com/vote/), leading to claims, counter claims, and lawsuits. Throughout it all, the most common sense suggestion comes from Rubin, who says that voting machines should be at least as secure as slot machines—including background checks on programmers and third-party auditors to monitor code. To that end, Nevada is turning to the Nevada Gaming Control Board to help settle on its e-voting systems. Down under, Australia, with its open-source Electronic Voting and Counting System (http://www.softimp.com.au/evacs.html), has hit on a reliable and affordable system that works; although in Europe, the Free E-Democracy Project (http://www.free-project.org/), which advocates the use of free software in government, has discontinued development of its Gnu.Free Internet Voting software.
More recently, the topic of licensing requirements for computer programmers in the June 2003 issue got everyone's dander up. In a really-it's-no-surprise turn of events, licensing is becoming a security issue. According to reports, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and corporate shills (oops, that's "industry groups") like the Business Software Alliance and the Information Technology Association of America are looking at "professional licenses for software writers, like those for doctors and engineers" (http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/12/03/computer.security.ap/index.html). At the same time, the same industry groups are buying elected officials—so far at the rate of $5.6 million—to slow down the implementation of security rules that cut into corporate profits. You'd think that requiring licenses would lead to a smaller, more highly trained workforce, ultimately boomeranging back to a more expensive software-developer marketplace. In short, corporations are complaining about the cost of complying with security standards, yet at the same time, proposing solutions that would conceivably drive costs even higher. And let's not even get into the issue of whether programmers at international development sites—that is, offshore outsourcing sites in India, China, Russia, Brazil, and the like—would have the same licensing requirements for developing security software.
These days, any discussion of outsourcing is a volatile one. In February 2003, estimates were pegging the worldwide market for business process outsourcing at about $127 billion in 2002, while market-research firm Gartner further projected it will grow to $200 billion by 2005. To date, there's little indication these projections have changed, although there's every indication that outsourcing doesn't necessarily work. Dell, for instance, has stopped routing corporate customers to technical support in India after customer complaints.
Likewise, the state of Indiana backed off from an embarrassing contract when it became known that "Energize Indiana," a program established to create high-tech jobs and assist unemployed Hoosiers in finding jobs, awarded a $15 million contract to an offshore software-development company instead of hiring homegrown programmers. Well, sort of backed off, that is until Indiana state Senator Jeff Drozda introduced legislation to permit as much as 20 percent of the workers on any state contract to be done by noncitizens. Still, this is a start and, as professor Norm Matloff says, it might well serve as a model for other states.
Ah, you gotta love it. When it comes to technology, politics, corruption, and stupidity, the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same—no matter how many times you look at them.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com