About time. Original article from Inquirer.net: CICT explores use of digital signatures.
MANILA, Philippines–The Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) has secured a $2.3-million grant from South Korea to help establish a national public key infrastructure (PKI) standards body in the Philippines.
This PKI body will be responsible for issuing digital signatures (or digital certificates) for individual and business users transacting with government-run websites.
It’s nice to know that got some grant so that the government can do some action. Doc Mana has been ranting about creating an infrastructure a few months ago during press releases about the modernization of the national elections.
Even if we did not receive a grant, the Philippines can creatively setup an infrastructure. Given that PKI technology is not new and a lot of local companies are providing these service anyway, we can simply setup a national federation of Certification Authorities (CAs) in the Philippines issues these public keys.
Probably most of the funds of the grant will go into the pilot deployment on government organizations like the BIR (which volunteered). But hey, how about Comelec? You guys have a deadline right?
Every second week of July (7-11) we celebrate the National Science and Technology Week. This year, it is DOST’s 50th anniversary so it is expected to be a very grand celebration (also probably the reason for cost-cutting the previous years :D). Too bad I won’t be able to go this year 
I looked at the DOST website to grabe some teaser news but the website does not seem to work. When I click on a news article, it goes back to the main page. Hey DOST web people, updates please! 
The del.icio.us Firefox add-on provides very neat integration into the latest version of Firefox three. I like the synchronization between local bookmarks, shortcuts, etc. The “most visited” tab actually counts how many times you clicked a bookmark and updates the toolbar respectively. The only problem is that for private bookmarks like the ones that initiate javascript link calls do not update the bookmark counters.
One of my favorite links is the citeulike.org’s add to library shortcuts which initiates a javascript call containing the current url on your browser such as an overview page of a journal article. This frustrated me for a while but after “grep”-ing my Firefox profile directory for the name of my citeulike bookmark, I edited the citeulike entry in my ~/.mozilla/firefox/$PROFILENAME/delcious.rdf:
<NC:Bookmark RDF:about="rdf:#$iw2hg3" NC:URL="javascript:var%20pw=window.open('http://www.citeulike.org/posturl?username=aespinosa&bml=popup&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title),%20'citeulike_popup_post',%20'width=800,height=600,scrollbars=1,resizable=1');%20void(window.setTimeout('pw.focus()',250));"
NC:Name="CiteULike: A free online service to organise your academic papers"
NC:ShortcutURL=""
NC:Description=""
NS1:LastCharset=""
NC:PostData=""
NS2:shared="false"
NS2:localonly="false"
NS2:hash="cfbf4f27149a10bca7a44c05be12ca99"
NS2:metahash="af1dd1906f18340e4a74c20e9497ceb3">
<NS2:tag>bibliography</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>citation</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>bookmarking</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>research</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>reference</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>academic</NS2:tag>
<NS2:tag>tagging</NS2:tag>
<NC:VisitCount NC:parseType="Integer">300</NC:VisitCount>
<NS1:LastModifiedDate NC:parseType="Date">Tue Jul 03 07:49:43 2007 +000000</NS1:LastModifiedDate>
<NC:BookmarkAddDate NC:parseType="Date">Tue Jul 03 07:49:43 2007 +000000</NC:BookmarkAddDate>
</NC:Bookmark>
The code entry above shows the XML entry for a bookmark. Simply change the “NC:VisitCount” tag to a very high value and it will appear at the top of your del.icio.us toolbar most-visited tab.
Enjoy your new favorite bookmark!
The past few weeks was very tight as I preparing from my resignation as an instructor in Ateneo (and attending parties). I will be joining the Computer Science Department at the University of Chicago for my graduate studies. My work will be on grid computing and distributed computing under the supervision of Dr. Ian Foster, the father of grid computing himself! He is also one of the founders of the Globus Toolkit project, the key middleware in every grid deployment in the world.
This blog site will still be up and maintained but my faculty page and ECCE wiki page will not be updated as much for the next six years. Below is my new contact information:
So if you’re around the Chicago-Hyde park area, drop me an email and let’s meet up! 
I was invited (via Facebook events) to attend the first CSP Kapihan discussing the technical aspects of computerizing the Philippine elections. Dr. Pablo Manalastas and Ms.Ito Gruet gave very interesting ideas and pointed out key concepts that the Comelec missed out in the planned pilot testing in the ARMM elections.
Doc Mana stressed out that the Vendors demonstrating ballot counting equipment simply saw the digital signatures as a burden to them despite the fact that the electronic documents such as ballots or election returns from the precints have to be digitally signed according to the law. His blog discusses what does it mean for a document to be digitally signed in detail. To my law school and lawyer friends, what does the e-commerce bill and election modernization bill really mean by digitally signing?
It was very interesting to note Ms. Ito Gruet’s point on the current election process. Of the 25-40 days that consumes the canvassing of votes, only one day is spent in the precint-level tallying. After that, the generated election returns will travel to various levels of canvassing boards to declare winners for municipalities, provinces and the Philippines. The the use of digital recording equipment or optical mark readers will only improve the counting on the election return generation. Clearly the bill describing the modernization of Philippine elections failed to analyze the entire process properly and misidentified the bottlenecks. I like Ms. Ito’s group’s suggestion to deploy a simple web app that will facilitate submission of election returns. With this we can simplify the communication process and reduce the possiblity of missing election returns as it travels to various boards of canvassers.
I had a fruitful discussion with Doc Mana and Dr. Bill Torres, grandfather of the Philippine internet and president of MozCom Philippines on how to deploy the system. In the process of submitting the encoded election return, the board of election inspector will digitally sign the submission to guarantee the authenticity of the data transmitted. In terms of deployment, we can integrate the DepEd’s school computerization program since most of the precints are public schools and the officers are the teacher. When the election season is not around, the computers can be used for their teaching materials. This is an efficient way of utilizing taxpayer’s resources for IT infrastructures. For communications, we can use our mobile phones as GPRS modems to send encoded data to the central database.
But with these suggestions comes new challenges to the system. Instead of political magnates using guns, goons and gold to propel their electoral machinery, they will be commissioning hackers to send denial of service attacks to Comelec’s web server so that no-one will be able to submit results of the election retur ns. Engineers building the system must be vigilant to prevent these attacks.
Links:
Recent Comments