Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 58

México es un país que, a lo largo de su historia, ha sufrido fraudes y otros malos manejos electorales, por medio de diferentes esquemas. Los mexicanos frecuentemente nos sentimos autoridades mundiales en este tema; la constante respecto a nuestras autoridades electorales ha sido más de duda y cuestionamiento que de confianza. Hubo un breve periodo, los últimos años de la década de los 1990 y los primeros de los 2000, en que parecía que se consolidaba una institución sólida y confiable, pero las dudas –fundadas o no– que surgieron tras la elección del 2006 devolvieron a las autoridades electorales a...

CURP: Clave Única del Registro Poblacional, or Unique Population Registry Code. This is a (hopefully) unique, 18 character long, string identifying each Mexican - I won’t get into the technicalities, but serve yourselves. By following such a convoluted scheme, the authorities should have ensured a biunivocal relation between each person and their CURP number. Well, at some point, due to a bureaucratical mishap completely outside my hands (my patron registered me with the wrong birth date, as you can see in the page at the bottom), I got two CURPs - And the procedure to fix it was far from...

Panama just underwent a nasty e-voting exercise: Electronic-mediated elections were held for the committee of the PRD party. It sounds simple - Even trivial! There were only 4100 authorized voters, it was geographically trivial (all set inside a stadium)… But it blew up in smoke. I won’t reiterate all what happened, I’ll rather direct you to our project’s (the e-voting observatorium) page: News regarding Panama (for those coming from the future, search starting at 2012-08-27 — and yes, it’s all in Spanish, but there are free-as-in-beer translation services. Many e-vote proponents/sellers/pushers were very eagerly waiting for this election to brag...

What, haven’t you heard about the WikiLovesMonuments photo contest around cultural heritage? Copying from its web page, Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo contest around cultural heritage monuments in September. Starting from the Netherlands in 2010 and organized on a European level in 2011, we go global in 2012! I heard about this initiative in Iván Martínez’s Wikimedia talk at COSIT 2012, held last week in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz (I intend to write a bit more regarding COSIT later on). I loved the idea, and intend to participate — Not because I take great pictures (I don’t, and I usually...

Sometimes, very rarely, I am happy that the spam filters in my personal mail server are so far from perfect. Many of us were amazed, some days ago, news broke that Amelia Earhart’s plane was found in the Southwestern Pacific. The news is amazing and worthy in itself. But today, I got this mail, proof that Amelia lived through all those years: (all addresses obscured, of course) Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 23:38:59 -0700 From: Amelia Earhart <some-mail@gmail.com> To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: Hello Reply-To: some-other-mail@live.com Hello friend, With due respect to humanity, i am compelled to write to you on...

Translation: The consumption of alcoholic beverages inside the campus will be punished. Avoid it! Article 95 of the general UNAM statute. So… What should be avoided? The message looks to me as calling for Article 95 to be reformed.

[ once again, I am translating somebody else’s material – In this case, my good Costa Rican friend Carolina Flores. Please excuse my stylistic mistakes — My English is far from native as you well know. But this material is worth sharing, and worth investing some tens of minutes doing a quick translation. If you can read Spanish, go read Caro’s original entry ] </p> Have you been to a music record store lately? I did so last Saturday, as a mere excercise. I was not planning on buying anything but I wanted to monitor things and confirm my suspicions....

¿Más acerca de votaciones? Sí, escucho el clamor de todos nuestros lectores, después de un proceso electoral más, de haber nuevamente soportado meses de saturación de candidatos en los medios. Sin embargo, este es el momento justo para analizar una importante parte del proceso electoral en la cual los desarrolladores de software, expertos en seguridad y administradores de sistemas podemos ejercer influencia sobre el rumbo que sigue el país — Y darnos el lujo de ignorar nuestro rol de profesionales hablaría muy mal de cada uno de nosotros. Es por esta razón que presento esta actualización de estado y reflexión...

Source: http://mexico.transeunte.org/2012/08/21/oficiales-de-transito-automoviles-y-la-verdad-sobre-el-flujo-vial/

During the COSIT 2011 conference, we held a very celebrated and fun impromptu talk. This was a very interesting session where many of the long-time Free Software activists in Mexico took the stage (we were waiting for a speaker who was late, so the audience was bored and waiting) and started talking –in a completely irreverent, disorganized way– about the status of network neutrality, ACTA, Free Software, Free Culture, legal issues regarding copyright and many other similar points. At some point or another, we had on stage: Fernando Romo “el Pop”, Alejandro Miranda “Pooka”, Sandino Araico, Claudia Hernández, Octavio Méndez…...