FREE e-democracy project / News: Recent posts

Hi everyone!

It's been delayed by all my commitments and pushed back by all my distractions. But most of the wait has been because our objectives for this release were pretty tricky to implement!

What's new in GNU.FREE 1.9?

+ Bug fixes
+ FreeInstall now parses XML config files
+ XML config now means we support multiple types of election system: the first being Borda and First Past the Post (this is the big one and it's been on the TODO for sooo long).... read more

FREE aims to provide a non-commercial private, secure, reliable and open electronic voting alternative to the commercial offerings.

We have released GNU.FREE 1.8 which includes:
+ A protocol overhaul - we now use an HMAC-SHA1 system initialised with a client-server seed/key swap. We also use sequence numbers to increase its resistance to replay attacks.
+ There's been some enhancing of key objects to enable us to tidy up the comms code.
+ We have begun the process of enabling GNU.FREE to deal with all counting and voting systems. In this release we include the XML we will use in future to define what vote/count system a GNU.FREE vote will use. We do this to elicit feedback and thought on any issues the use of XML may raise - such as is it best to define how GNU.FREE handles the systems specified in an XML file through code or text files (i.e. more XML)?
+ Bugs have been fixed, especially a major one in the installer. Concurrency in the servers has also been improved.

Version 1.7 has been released offering many improvements and bug fixes. The two major features are communications-level end-to-end RSA/Blowfish encryption and the inclusion of the new PollManager application which allows postal, conventional and Internet votes to all be managed using the GNU.FREE database.

We are very proud to release GNU.FREE version 1.6 which offers the following new features:
+ Internationalisation support has been added the FreeClient with 9 languages now available.
+ Logs have tamper resistance due to a message digest system. Using FreeTest the administrator can check to see which line of the logs tampering began at.
+ The central data structures have been improved to remove large amounts of redundant and/or repeated code.
+ GNU.FREE now has out of the box support for PostgeSQL and MySQL, with the installer providing all the setup you need to talk to them.
+ FreeInstall now supports multiple ports so that RTServer and ERServer can be run on the same physical machine - for test purposes.
+ Test Ballots can now be created. These are used to prove that voting XXXX actually registers XXXX in the
+ RTServer. This system is blind until the final step to stop a test vote being registered as a real vote.
+ The GNU.FREE Testing Suite (FreeTest) has been massively updated to support stress testing with the new security architectures developed over the last few versions. It also generates test data for importing into the servers.
+ Menus have been added to the server interfaces making regular use more streamlined.
+ The log console display has been vastly improved with the inclusion of auto-scrolling, word-wrap and the long awaited return of colour!
+ Automated Electoral Roll data import has been implemented. Data is read in the CSV format. ... read more

Hi everyone,

+ GNU.FREE: Heavy-Duty Internet Voting
A Java voting system that provides scalable, reliable, secure and
private ballots over TCP/IP networks.
- GNU.FREE is an official package of the GNU project and is supported
by FreeDevelopers.net

+ Latest news
After nearly four months of hard work we're proud to release the
latest version of GNU.FREE:

Version 1.5

A whole range of new features and improvements make it a landmark
release for the FREE e-democracy project. The major changes:... read more

On the 8th of Feb FREE became an official GNU package. As a result it will become known as GNU.FREE

Thanks to all the hard work of everyone involved GPL'ed Internet Voting takes another step towards legitimacy!

Release 1.4 of our Java-based internet voting system is here. Bringing security, reliability and verification improvements it's the guaranteed way to run any presidential election!

Downloadable from Sourceforge and mirrors as of now.

FREE 1.2.1 is out. In this release we bring you:

- Automated install system
- Logging upgrade to use log4j 0.8.3
- We have transitioned to follow GNU release guidelines

And, of course, some bug fixes including the removal of doubled debug output.

Some bugs have been fixed, slight architecture change and a new logging system to create audit trails!

Our open source electronic voting system was launched today.

Source code can be downloaded from http://www.thecouch.org/free/