The political process is not as straightforward as the article suggests: It will first be passed on to a committee which will listen for various experts and interested parties, including copyright holders' associations. The committee will then be free to make amendments and changes to the proposal, even though the proposal is already written in a form of law text. After the committee it will probably be subjected to other various committees for review, for example the constitutional committee to check if it is in alignment with the constitution. At the end of this long committee process is the public vote in the Parliament, which is most often just a formality.

Therefore it is not guaranteed at all that the intended changes will pass even if the law will be changed in the parliament.

The finnish legislation standard used to be (until 2000's where they passed some questionable laws) to lay down technologically neutral laws, where the technology used played no important role but the actual action by the person did no matter what the tool used. This proposed legislation is just an exception to be amended to the current law, which regulates the use of other people's property, which you currently are not allowed to use without a prior permission. Currently some of the facilities offer free WiFi without informing you of such and this behaviour would be illegal by the law even when it's not easy to detect or to prosecute. So they are for the sake of clarity, going to make an exception because it is often hard to find out whether you're allowed to use the open network or not.

The human translation for newstext:

Joining a wireless accesspoint to be legalized

The ministry of justice is forming a law to allow use of unprotected WiFi access points. By the current law the unauthorized use of open networks has been illegal.

The exception is rationalized by for example, the lack of harm done, impossibility of oversight and the relative easiness of protecting the network. For the end user it is also often difficult to find out when the network is meant for public use and when it is not.

The statements received by the ministry of justice (which includes EFFI, Electronic Frontier Finland, by transl.) remind that the avilability of free WiFi access has increased in public space such as parks and air fields and they don't always inform the end user of the free availability.

According to the ministry of justice, there has been only one sentence for the use of unsecured WiFi by the district court. Higher court upheld the decision and it never went to the supreme court.

Most of the statements were for the legalization. However, many of them held it in high value that the owner of the access point should be held innocent in case of the illegal use of the access point.

Experts' opinion is that a lot of the WiFi access points are unsecured and the unauthorized use of them is common. Securing of the access point is usually easy when following the manuals of the access point.

The unauthorized use of the access point might slow the network down but it is hard to note unless there's a lot of file transfers compared to the bandwidth available.

The finnish legislation standard used to be (until 2000's where they passed some questionable laws) to lay down technologically neutral laws, where the technology used played no important role but the action did. This proposed legislation is just an exception to be amended to the current law, which regulates the use of other people's property, which you currently are not allowed to use without a prior permission. Currently some of the facilities offer free WiFi without informing you of such and this behaviour would be illegal by the law even when it's not easy to detect or to prosecute. So they are for the sake of clarity, going to make an exception because it is often hard to find out whether you're allowed to use the open network or not.

The human translation for newstext:

Joining a wireless accesspoint to be legalized

The ministry of justice is forming a law to allow use of unprotected WiFi access points. By the current law the unauthorized use of open networks has been illegal.

The exception is rationalized by for example, the lack of harm done, impossibility of oversight and the relative easiness of protecting the network. For the end user it is also often difficult to find out when the network is meant for public use and when it is not.

The statements received by the ministry of justice (which includes EFFI, Electronic Frontier Finland, by transl.) remind that the avilability of free WiFi access has increased in public space such as parks and air fields and they don't always inform the end user of the free availability.

According to the ministry of justice, there has been only one sentence for the use of unsecured WiFi by the district court. Higher court upheld the decision and it never went to the supreme court.

Most of the statements were for the legalization. However, many of them held it in high value that the owner of the access point should be held innocent in case of the illegal use of the access point.

Experts' opinion is that a lot of the WiFi access points are unsecured and the unauthorized use of them is common. Securing of the access point is usually easy when following the manuals of the access point.

The unauthorized use of the access point might slow the network down but it is hard to note unless there's a lot of file transfers compared to the bandwidth available.

I'm also a Finn and I was counting the votes at the municipal elections in Helsinki late last year. The system is even more tamper proof than described previously. First of all, the ballot box is checked at the casting of the first vote that there's no extra votes within the box. The first vote is stamped (like the rest will be) and put in to the box. The parties have a right to set an observer for the whole time until the votes have been counted. The next day the votes are recounted (which is where I was part of):

All districts are dealt out randomly to counting groups. The groups then count the votes and if they agree on the number of votes with the first count - and don't disqualified any votes accepted previously due to certain criteria - then the result is accepted. The votes can be disqualified for multiple reasons: The vote paper might be completely unmarked and it is counted separately as an official form of protesting against every party. The other reasons are ambiguous number (usually trouble separating 1 from 7 and 6 from 0 or numbers that look different upside down, like 188 vs. 881 when a single vertical bar is used for number 1.), additional non-clarifying markings in the vote that could be used to link the person to the vote (to prevent vote buying & selling), lack of stamping (to prevent people slipping in multiple votes within the true vote) or using other than official voting paper in voting. Lot of votes disqualified contain all kinds of messages to the government, from a friendly "F U government!" to cryptic messages to God or Bavarian Illuminati.

If the result is in any way different from the previous count then it is dealt randomly to another counting group which will verify the result. All the disqualified votes go to the jurisdiction to give a final verdict on the votes and if possible decide the candidate the ambiguous vote is for.

All this counting is done in a group supervised by political parties, though in current stable political environment the supervision is only superficial. Being a member of this counting process has only increased my trust in paper voting and distrust in e-voting.