Zaatxe - Slashdot User

Submission + - Music industry first revenue increase since 1999, thanks to digital distribution (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Zaatxe on Wednesday February 27, 2013 @07:41AM

Zaatxe writes: The music industry, the first media business to be consumed by the digital revolution, said on Tuesday that its global sales rose last year for the first time since 1999, raising hopes that a long-sought recovery might have begun. The increase, of 0.3 percent, was tiny, and the total revenue, $16.5 billion, was a far cry from the $38 billion that the industry took in at its peak more than a decade ago. Still, even if it is not time for the record companies to party like it’s 1999, the figures, reported Tuesday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, provide significant encouragement. “At the beginning of the digital revolution it was common to say that digital was killing music,” said Edgar Berger, chief executive of the international arm of Sony Music Entertainment. Now, he added, it could be said “that digital is saving music.”

Submission + - E-Voting Raises New Questions in Brazil

Submitted by

Zaatxe

on Sunday October 01, 2006 @05:34PM

Zaatxe writes: "Today is elections day in Brazil. About 125 million people are expected to vote today for president, governor, congressman (for both state and federal levels) and senator. The Washington Post online has some interesting details about the electronic voting machines used in Brazil.
From the article:
Elections in Brazil used to be a monumental challenge, with millions of paper ballots to count by hand, many of them delivered by canoe and horseback from remote Amazon villages. Fraud was widespread, and it often took a week or more to determine the winners.
Latin America's largest country eliminated many of these hassles by switching to electronic voting a decade ago, long before the United States and other countries started abandoning paper ballots. When 125 million Brazilians vote on Sunday, they will punch computer keyboards, part of a system Brazil credits for building faith in its democracy.
But some computer programmers who have closely examined Brazil's system say such confidence is misguided. [...] Some Brazilians are lobbying the tribunal to switch from Windows CE to an open-source operating system for the voting machines, since Microsoft Corp., citing trade secrecy, won't allow independent audits to make sure malicious programmers haven't inserted commands to "flip" votes from one candidate to another.

As a brazilian voter, it was a shock for me to see that the voting machines here are made by Diebold. But what makes me confident in the system can also be found in the article:

Given the choice of picking a system where wholesale rigging is easy, versus one where it's impossible, why has Brazil gone with the system where it's easy? Brazil did build in some safeguards during its transition to electronic voting _ protections that still don't exist in the U.S. While the code behind Microsoft's operating system remains secret, independent auditors must approve of the overlying voting software before it is inserted into the nation's 430,000 machines. The software remains open to inspections for three months before election day. And hours before the polls open, randomly chosen voting machines are tested "to verify that the software inside does what it is supposed to do."

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