Skip to main content

Student Politics

This year I'm Athletic Union Treasurer, voting member of the Sports Zone committee and voting member of HUU council.

For the past 2 council meetings we did not meet quorum. Leading to a chicken and egg problem:

  1. Loads of things are not ratified and a lot of people are not elected to sit on different committees.

  2. Some structural pieces struggled because of this (notably societies).

  3. UEC had a proposal to change the quorum pool 50%+1 of the elected council members instead of 50%+1 of the total possible amount of council members.

  4. UEC had a hung vote 2 vs 2. And chair of UEC made a deciding vote to pass this SO change such that council will vote on this (ratification vote).

  5. At the last minute 2 council members arrive (shortly before the vote).

  6. The council then votes 12 (in favour) vs 10 (against) vs 2 (obstension). Prove me wrong, but if not the last minute arrival of 2 people people council voting would have been a hung vote and the chair of council would have to take deciding vote. As far as I'm aware chair of UEC is currently the chair of council, hence there was a possibility that he would have to take deciding vote on the matter twice.

  7. When we moved on to first item of the agenda "Election Chair of Council". VP Education stood up, interrupted the council and said "If 6 people will walk out now we won't be quorate again". This leaded to massive walk-out and end of council.


I have voted against the ratification of the quorum change. My reasoning here is that such controversial decisions shall only be pushed by unanimous backing from all VP's. If four people have a split vote how do expect 24 people not to have a split vote. In these two votes we had a swing of 3 votes that "represented" 21 000 members of HUU.

Last council showed lack of leadership and team effort from exec team. I did not see "All for one and One for All". Even my beloved HUU president Helen from last year managed to create an image and illusion of united union behind the exec team. And despite the personal differences (and motions of no confidence) IT WORKED.

And VP Education, in my opinion, was not at his behaviour by discouraging people from representing HUU members who voted for us to be in that room. I ran against 2 other candidates to become AU treasurer with 40+ club presidents going through 2 rounds of voting. I'm not going to betray odd 1000 people who join AU each year & run the teams.

After further considerations, I will be running for the chair of council this Monday.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Achieving actually full disk encryption of UEFI ESP at rest with TCG OPAL, FIPS, LUKS

Achieving full disk encryption using FIPS, TCG OPAL and LUKS to encrypt UEFI ESP on bare-metal and in VMs Many security standards such as CIS and STIG require to protect information at rest. For example, NIST SP 800-53r5 SC-28 advocate to use cryptographic protection, offline storage and TPMs to enhance protection of information confidentiality and/or integrity. Traditionally to satisfy such controls on portable devices such as laptops one would utilize software based Full Disk Encryption - Mac OS X FileVault , Windows Bitlocker , Linux cryptsetup LUKS2 . In cases when FIPS cryptography is required, additional burden would be placed onto these systems to operate their kernels in FIPS mode. Trusted Computing Group  works on establishing many industry standards and specifications, which are widely adopted to improve safety and security of computing whilst keeping it easy to use. One of their most famous specifications them is TCG  TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module). TPMs are now...
Post a Comment
Read more

Encrypt all the things

xkcd #538: Security Went into blogger settings and enabled TLS on my custom domain blogger blog. So it is now finally a https://blog.surgut.co.uk  However, I do use feedburner and syndicate that to the planet. I am not sure if that is end-to-end TLS connections, thus I will look into removing feedburner between my blog and the ubuntu/debian planets. My experience with changing feeds in the planets is that I end up spamming everyone. I wonder, if I should make a new tag and add that one, and add both feeds to the planet config to avoid spamming old posts. Next up went into gandi LiveDNS platform and enabled DNSSEC on my domain. It propagated quite quickly, but I believe my domain is now correctly signed with DNSSEC stuff. Next up I guess, is to fix DNSSEC with captive portals. I guess what we really want to have on "wifi" like devices, is to first connect to wifi and not set it as default route. Perform captive portal check, potentially with a reduced DNS server capabil...
3 comments
Read more

Security-only OpenSSL tarball releases for CVE-2026-2673

On Friday May the 13th OpenSSL project has published advisory details for  CVE-2026-2673 . The CVE is treated as non-important by the project. The patches are only provided as commits on the stable branches. No git tag, no precise fixed version, and no source tarballs provided. The patches that were merged to openssl-3.5 and openssl-3.6 branches were not based on top of the last stable point release and did not split code changes & documentation updates. It means that cherry-picking the commits referenced in the advisory will always lead to conflicts requiring manual resolution. It is not clear if support is provided for snapshot builds off the openssl-3.5 and openssl-3.6 branches. As the builds from the stable branches declare themselves as dev builds of the next unreleased point release. For example, in contrast to projects such as vim and glibc, with every commit to stable branches explicitly recommended for distributors to ship and is supported. I have requested OpenSSL ups...
Post a Comment
Read more