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BSD And Politics
qbasicprogrammer writes: "At Daily Daemon News, Josh Pennell says the Reform Party's National Primary Online Election was constantly under attack during the 72-hour election window, however IOActive (the Reform Party's hosting service)'s OpenBSD server kept the kiddies and crackers away. According to the reader comments, Ralph Nader is using BSD/OS, as is the Libertarian Party Web site. It's nice to see political parties believe in freedom of software."
Open-source is nice - closed nominating process is not. Bouncers turned away anyone who didn't support Pat "Ruler of the Pit" Buchanan.
Read the rest in friday's news update:
www.ridiculopathy
There are two possibilities here, neither of which is very good.
1. Nader is lying.
2. Nader can't do simple arithmetic
Neither says much for his desirability as a president.
--
WordSocket Voice BBS Software
As much as I hate to agree with this by and large I have to.
3 reasons:
1. I grew up in rural Maine. I knew a LOT of people who deliberately worked the welfare system. It wasn't that they were stupid, it was that they preferred to NOT work as much as they could. I hung out with these people, I dated these people. This exists.
2. (really another version of 1) -- My mother owns her own business. People have claimed to have applied for work there on their welfare forms when they had not (welfare calls and checks up sometimes) Also -- people would come in when she was not hiring and "apply" for a job to fulfill the welfare rules.
3. 2 years ago, after I quit a career in the theatre (being a very skilled seamstress pays LOTS less than a somewhat skilled web developer -- go figure)I spent a while QUITE poor, and then a while in a HORRIBLE job for health insurance while I got skills that actually paid. It helps that I like it, but nevertheless, it was a bit of a journey from needles to computers.
Where am I going with this -- welfare can be a very helpful hand up for people who need it (I never used it, thank you) but is VERY abused. People can learn the skills necessary to get out of poverty.
It's no wonder he's "distancing" himself from the Greens' watermelon platform. (watermelon=green on the outside, red on the inside).
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
In my view it dosn't matter what is in place or how noble or enlightend or great it is... It's been in place for about 40 years and it hasn't worked. At some point you have to say "Enough" and try again.
Welfare was a great idea but it was made to save the United States during the depression. It did the job. Maybe not elegently but it worked.
The problem is this quickfix was extended for decades. It should have NEVER run this long. It stopped working in the 1960s and thats becouse it was in place far to long by that time...
It worked.. it worked well.. It it's not a long term solution.
The education system was ment to be the long term solution. However from my point of view it seems many school adminstraters learnned they get more money when the schools don't teach than when they do. Rewarded by falure.
This was never so hilighted as when the local school administation gave themselvs rases when the voters gave the schools more money. In short the voters voted for a pay rase and didn't even know it untill it was to late.
Russia dosn't have this problem. No democracy.
The problem is people like our friend here would run screamming with hands over ears when ever anyone said anything bad about the school system or welfare. They prefer the narrow mindedness of supporting the status que.
Anyone who challanges welfare.. shows it to be a failure.. is branded anti-poor.
Anyone who challanges the school system is similerly branded...
No you can't have a valid consider and be against me... nooo you have to be evil... the dark side... darth vader...
And then there are people who just want to lable Slashdot... throw around stuff becouse they want open source to be in one political camp.
They can't stand to realise... a politican canidate who has been STRONGLY open source... Ralf Nader... is NOT Libertarian but a member of the Green Party... A very very propoverty...
Oh.. and as for consern... want consern? Your are gona love this.... Now I love the green party supporters to death and they are all great people and really have huge hearts... so don't mistake what I'm about to say...
But the green party party line views the poor as a ecological desaster...
Yeah.. and amazingly enough the Green Party cares more about the poor than any other party but the offical line lables them not as a human or socal consern but an ecological one...
Oh well... you really can't read the minds of the people by party lines.
I don't actually exist.
No, but my comment was posted for the benifit of those who do. :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
BSD/OS is neither free software, Free Software, nor open source.
Well, I was comparing candidates, not parties. The differences between the parties are less marked than those between the individuals. For example I could imagine John McCain running Linux and Walter Mondale running an AS/400, for example (c'mon, it's fun!).
t s.org
;-)
Anyway, are you sure of what you're saying? Care to back it up with URLs? Not that it's that important, of course...
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.rnc.org
www.rnc.org is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.democra
www.democrats.org is running Netscape-Enterprise/2.01 on AIX
I'm sure the User Friendly strip would not be so surprised, and maybe think it is a hairy deal...
Libertarians cut across the left/right spectrum with solutions that appeal to everyone.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
and I think we are now in new millenium :-)
Bye
Hey Marko!
Not before next year
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I mentioned the chance of uninformed voters electing a "total boob", and your response sounds like you assumed I meant a third-party candidate. :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Or
;) Or that the LibDems (who you'd have to be pretty paranoid to smear at a national level) wanted to rush the UK into a European superstate with no more sovereignty than a US state.
:(
d) Stop ballots. If you can (somehow) get at the boxes between the polling stgation and the counters, you can disrupt it that way.
OTOH, you don't necessarily have to go to this sort of trouble. The percentage of the population who actually know what the issues and positions are on pretty much anything is _tiny_. Over here, there's been several surveys showing both a public demand for longer prison sentences and a severe underestimation of what sentences were actually handed out. Go figure...
If you have a reasonable amount of power, the easiest thing to do is to get misinformation out into the halfway trusted mass-market newspapers. In the UK, say the Labour party want to put up taxes lots to make prisons more comfortable and give all new entrants to this country triple benefits. Or the Tories want to, erm, make all education private? Actually, it's getting pretty difficult to come up with something implausibly extreme for Hague to say, he's gone so far right
Let's jump the pond. Bush could say that Gore wants to drastically reduce the size of the military, or Gore that Bush wanted to remove all social protection legislation. Whoops, probably a little close to the bone there, too...
Anyway, you get the idea. Once you have any degree of media influence, by far the most effective way to disrupt an election is to affect the casting of votes by getting the public to believe utter rubbish. It's rather sad quite to what extent some trust the media
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Al (internet) Gore invented linux in 1983 with a grant from AT&T. Where have you all been?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
You make it sound that that would be coincidence.
How would it come that the cheapest bidder runs BSD? Could it be because it:
- is easy (i.e. cheap) to administer
- gets max. performance from the hardware
- has least downtime
Do you really think that they understand free(dom) software with this sort of statement (about Y2K)?
Heh - he needs to get acquainted with shrink-wrap EULAs. Then he'd find out about how much a statement like that one was worth.;)
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
I doubt that Nader and Reform have the slightest notion of the differences in systems. They just sent out word that they wanted secure webservers and then hired the geeks who said that they could do it....
:) (as opposed to the 3.73 10^7 reasons not to vote for Bush & Gore.)
Even so, it'd be a feather in their caps if they like what they've got and publicly say so.
Nader's given me a reason to vote for him.
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
So how did they get federal approval to hold on-line voting? last I heard the feds couldnt understand how to add the "screw the middle class" filter installed. Oh and they were wondering how to add in a "be sure the poor cant vote" clause by making it impossible to vote from a public computer (Only your personally owned computer)
I know, I'm cynical... but all politicians suck.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Libertarian Party no(ish) to MS breakup
BSD/OS is definitely not BSD licensed -- it's a derivative of 4.4BSD that in its turn is a mix of BSD-licensed and other code. BSD-licensed subset of 4.4BSD (known as 4.4BSD-Lite) was used as the starting point for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, so all three are under BSD license now (to be formally correct I should add that they also contain utilities under GPL, X11, perl dual licensing and other Open Source licenses, however usable subset is under BSD license) while BSD/OS isn't.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I have a feeling Ol' Ralphy boy doesn't even know what an operating system is. Please don't make his ISP's choice a political thing.
This is exactly why people hate BSD and other open source products. All this stupid "hey look...he's using it...it must be cool" stuff turns people off. Let its merits speak for itself and the people will come.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Neither of them is likely to know the difference between Linux and Charlie Brown's piano playing friend with a similar name.
Linux & Schroeder don't sound at all alike.
To make the above post correct, sed 's/piano\ playing/blanket-carrying/'
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
Huh? What?
:) That company is using MS.
Based on everything I've read about Bush (he's a manager, listens to aides, delegates work, doesn't like to deal with things that are of interest to him, likes brief analyses), I truly doubt that he gave any input into the choice of software that runs his web-site. I doubt he knows or cares what's running his official campaign site.
Realistically, a staffer, or even someone from the RNC, took bids for site-design & hosting, with the lowest bid winning (or someone's brother got the job
"No the os is going to be an idilog choice... "
The OS is *not* an ideological issue in the election. The OS used by the company that hosts the web page for the candidate has *zero* significance to the public. That's like saying that the choice of engine in the tour bus McCain used has deep ideological import. Or that Bush chose his ad agency based on the software they use on their design computers.
That's just silly.
Don't look for correlation and causality where no exist.
ShoutingMan.com
Very nice.
NerdPerfect.com : breakfast of champions.
Politicians do dictate everything no matter how much they do or don't know.
Bush selected Microsoft becouse in the Republican idiolog only the wealthyest corpration in America could produce the best operating system. Free is garbage and Bill Gates is the solution.
Al Gore selected Linux becouse the Democrats basic philosophy of people. Again not an informed tech choice but an idilog that matches the realitys.
Had Linus been rich and Gates poor Bush would have used Linux...
Had Windows been open sourced and Linux closed Al would have used Windows...
It's all idiolog... yes they live sleep eat breath and umm go to the bathroom.. in idilog.. they live what they speak. The become what they say. This allows them to get away with murder as even when covered in blood they embody the views others have. They need not even believe those ideas. Just live them... And with that the need not cover anything.
Bill Clinton was cought with an intern. Let's face it.. any moron can get away with an affare with a willing subordinate. That was a really sloppy coverup...
But we forgive him becouse he eat sleeps and breaths what we want him to believe. We'll never know if he believes a word of it. We do know he acts the part really well.
Thats the point....
No the os is going to be an idilog choice...
I'm supprised BSD was used... I'd be supprised of Solarus was used. Thies are better choices but don't match the idilogs as well as Linux or Windows.
By now my grandmother knows what Linux and Windows is. Not that she could make in informed tech choice. She'd say "I don't use computers" and thats her os choice... NONE...
In local political campaigns canidates will use oponents choice of operating system to sniff out political views...
You better belive it matters....
I don't actually exist.
If their own site is like that, I would not want them to make one for me :) (stupid front-page redirect, trying to hold me hostage! And forcing an itty-bitty panel with scroll arrows? Hello, 17" monitor and browser scroll bars! Harumph.)
ShoutingMan.com
Crackers, script kiddies, the Dems, the Republicans? The mind boggles, the newest political plumbers have to fix internet pipes now. It is a good sign for the BSD's, though, I myself recommended them this week as the safest internet host, a cut about MacOS because MacOS is closed.
Anyway, disinformation and propaganda is considered part of the game. Outright cheating is not.
I don't think online voting can solve the old problems of a democracy. I was merely wondering how to avoid causing new ones.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Do they really? Or did they just happen to have some smart people around who were able to grab the best tool for this specific job.
Or maybe I'm just a cynical bastard this morning.
sig not found
I want these political parties to be 100% in favor of freedom of people!
We already have freedom of software. There is no law against using Linux or BSD. My freedom includes the freedom to use Windows, MacOS or Solaris. Patents and copyrights might be valid political issues, but the since the time of the first vacumn tube, the right to create and distribute Free and Open Source Software was always ours.
It's absolutely stupid to judge a candidate by whether they use the software you prefer. What's next, judging them by whether they use the same aftershave as do?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
... ever since that /. article with those terrible graphics I've been dying to try out BSD. Not that Pat, Ralph or Jessie have anything to do with it.
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
Don't want to get in a political discussion, but "a political move" can be good enough: he's been aware of the importance of the internet for a long time, and is trying to do the right thing on it. Not bad.
But indeed, trying, and being lame in the trying, is maybe worse than doing nothing. That's the Republicans' main point against bore, I mean Gore.
Side note: I guess the web development company hired by Gore 2000 could be described as "centrist":From http://www.idev.com/ (wow I really hate their web site).
Hey, what can I say, some of the things that these guys do makes sense, and some is just a little too radical, held under the reform party umbrella, schweet move!
Eh...
Of course, but I figured that was a subset of a)
/Guran
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Why am I not surprised?
b ush.com
0 00.com
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.georgew
www.georgewbush.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.algore2
www.algore2000.com is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.1pl2 secured_by_Raven/1.5.1 on Linux
I agree that this is not the only way (or even the best way) to choose a political affiliation.
However, if you want to know which party "gets" the Open Source movement, there's really only one answer.
to protect the wealthy (only police and justice).
So if I work hard for a living, I'm not entitled to protection?
I've lived in the poor parts of town, and let me tell you that it is *nothing* like what the Liberals would have you think. If those people weren't so lazy, they wouldn't be poor! A simple solution, wouldn'y you agree?
-- Floyd
-- Floyd
Well, most people here are constantly ranting about the evils of government/socialism/capitalism or whatever half-baked idea they have at the time, and going on about how only libertarianism can save us all from the evils of life.
And as for poor people, well I've read some great statements on both /. and k5 about how poor people just need to get up off of their arses and stop being so lazy. After all, if they wanted to have money then they'd obviously have it! Since this is the case then things like welfare are just a waste of money and it might encourage them to earn something if they knew that they'd be left to rot on the streets otherwise.
Some fine examples of just how out of touch slashbots are with the rest of reality.
That's Buchanan and Reform Party, not Nader and Green Party.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
There are many dimensions to political view. I think two of the major ones are liberal/conservative, and then libertarian/authoritarian. Most geeks would have a libertarian streak to them, but that does not really dictate whether they are liberal or conservative...for instance, I'm a libertarian liberal.
see: http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
A sourcecode audit has been done on the base OpenBSD system (so that's the base install, stuff in packages/ports hasn't been checked (it would take years). What you mean by "obsd team's audit of the FreeBSD source that became obsd", i don't know :) OpenBSD was based on netBSD (a project to which theo deraadt was a core member)
Or, did you simply not notice the ones who were working two jobs and trying to support a family, because they were never lounging around the neighborhood in the middle of the day. Because of your personal observations in one town, you can safely generalize that all poor people are lazy? No, I don't think so; just because you have an MIT email address does not mean you are omniscient.
Oh, yeah? What "long-haired hippy" chose Windows 2000 + IIS for Bush? The answer is none. A suit with money coming out his pores probably did. And that does shed a light on Bush: he's a fortunate son of an oil tycoon.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Sorry.
ESR says otherwise. No guns, no geek.
-- Floyd
-- Floyd
When at /., what is of interest to me is what OS/package some of these websites are running. It would be neat to some of the stats from each one (hits, data transfered, etc), interviews or background on the person(s) responsible, whether they chose a dedicated server option, multiple servers, or bought 10MB from a webhosting company, and possibly, where technology fits in with each candidate's philosophy (although that usually has no substance).
/. opinion regarding them. I read about politics elsewhere and have no plans to be swayed by one /. opinion or another.
What matters not to me are the politics espoused by these websites and each
ymmv,
I bet it was Lars trying to get in to add their system in the banned users list.
You have your stories a bit wrong.
About 5 years ago, Theo left (to be nice) the NetBSD project to form OpenBSD. All of the BSDs borrow code from each other, but all also develop a lot of code themselves.
OpenBSD has more NetBSD code in it than FreeBSD, it anything, and all of that code undergoes a code -level audit before an OpenBSD release ships. This helps security and it helps stability (what better way to find bugs?)
Well, the way they suggest helping the poor is basically through charity (unless I'm mistaken). It is my opinion that instead of designing a system that enables wild extremes of wealth and then "hoping" the wealthy give some back to the poor, we should design the system so that there aren't such wild extremes in the first place. I don't care what you think, Bill Gates is not ($4 billion / ~$28,000) times a better human than the average person. Sure the system is broken now. That's not an excuse to do *nothing*.
I also challenge the view that government is the wolf itself. Sure government can be corrupted (um, for instance by billions of corporate dollars). Remember this thing called "government" is what we created to get out of the "natural state", that we all agreed in the 1800's was no good. What we need to do is fix the system, and enact barriers to corrupting influence (for one, strike down the law that makes corporations full-fledged citizens, that's just bullshit; and two, publicly finance elections - no PAC money...both positions Nader is taking). Removing the system because you think that order is inherently evil will just land you back in the "natural state". Fortunate for some of the people who espouse this, this is exactly where they want to be.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
You can stop the ballots before they even get to the box. Election results in many countries have been influenced because of intimidation by both government and para-governmental militias. BLow up a polling station as a warning, shoot up some neighbourhoods where your enemies live.
With enough planning, it might be possible for a selective DoS to keep your enemies from voting online. If you can identify where they are coming from, or the time of day they are likely to vote, or simply find that a lower turnout in general will influence the result in your favour, just make it hard for voters to get through.
Ralph Nader is running on the Green Party ticket. I think that free (as in speech) software corresponds closely with the Green Party's ideals. I attended a Ralph Nader speech this year, he is very concerned about the power that large corporations weild. And that Bill Gate's net worth is equal to the lowest 120 million Americans.
Now that was my point. If there is no central server to DoS, but a large number of servers, each serving a random subset of voters, you would have a much harder time DoS-ing them AND you could not make make a more aimed effort (unless, as you suggested, you know that your opponents supporters are more likely to vote at a certain time)
Sure you could still keep *some* people away, but it would not be a predictable result.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Oops !
;-)
I forgot you are even allied int this horrible conspiracy/Big brother project called Echelon !!
More seriously France has always considered US as an ally, however when it comes on the subject of national security there's always a tendancy to put the emphasis on the word NATIONAL.
I just wonder if it was the same by your side in the states...
(Seems that it isn't...
)
I don't care what you think, Bill Gates is not ($4 billion / ~$28,000) times a better human than the average person.
Hmm, so you measure a person's worth through the amount of money they have? Wow, you're a real "people" person aren't you?
me : "GWBush, why do you like BSD?" GWB : "I dont listen to HipHop"
www.usamabinladen.net
"It's nice to see political parties believe in freedom of software."
No they don't. They pay smart people to believe in it for them. What it really comes down to is who pays off the most people and kisses the most ass on Capitol Hill. This is why when the DOJ went after Intel for antitrust, Intel ran to Washington to make sure that their buddies in congress cleaned up the whole mess. Thsi is why when Sun and Netscape spent years buying off politicians while Micros~t was basking in the light of their ill-gotten gains, the government jumped all over Micros~t like white on rice.
And most of all, this is why after the next round of elections, Micros~t will be the US Government's best friend.
Politicians and their parties believe in money. Not free software.
I don't know is the government really that much larger an object of hate and online attacks, then, say, Microsoft? Maybe there are more people that hate the U.S. government, but I'd be willing to bet that more hackers and script kiddies alike hate MS.
But I do believe that we need some foolproof method of tamper-proofing online voting before we switch to it. My ideas:
Make all voting records public. That's right, if you want to, you should be able to download every gigabyte of votes cast, and count them to make sure the totals are correct. Each vote should be identified by a one-way hash of the voter's name and password, to keep things anonymous. That way each voter could check that his own vote was recorded correctly.
That would effectively prevent hackers from removing or changing votes or changing the vote totals without being discovered. You could improve on it (e.g. have the vote-collecting server return a digitally signed copy of the vote + date/time, so you could prove "yes I did submit this vote at this time"), but it's still got a big problem - how do you prevent a hacker from inserting new votes? I don't know any foolproof way (short of removing anonymous voting) to protect against that.
Any ideas?
OpenBSD code never came from NetBSD, OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD
Umm.. hello? Anybody home?
Not as unpredicatable as you might think. The easiest case to plan for is the last one I mentioned, where an overall-lower voter turnout influences the result of the election. This is also quite common, at least where I live. Making voting, and registration for voting, more inconvenient will tend to make it more likely for certain groups not to vote. In the extreme case, suppressing voter turnout will ensure that an election is fought mainly between the hard-core supporters of different candidates/parties (they are the most interested in the outcome, and porbably have the time and resources available to them to overcome obstacles to voting). This means that winning an election is easier to plan, because a smaller group needs to be mobilized to vote. Depending upon polling, demographics of your supporters, etc., you may find that cutting down the total number of voters by presenting obstacles to voting is a worthwhile strategy.
Topic says it all. Sure, with floppie (cdrom for some like NT) I can secure most any OS from crackers trying to write changes.
Add in your turn off other services I can help prevent them from getting in.
What if there is a hole in the web server? It has happened before ya know. Or maybe a ping of death type attack. Whatever. Once the OS is shutdown or cracked (think shutdown -h now) someone needs to (perhaps physically) reboot the machine. Since machines tend to take a few minutes to reboot (mine takes over a minute in the bios, though half of that is finding my scsi harddrives). It is fairly simple once a hole is found to shutdown the machine, to write a script to do so.
Remember this is a poltical website. You have to consider that the person doing the cracking might not just be a script kiddie, he might be an otherwise intellegant adult with poltical motivations. Someone trying to shutdown a website for political reasons isn't as interested in gaining root as he is with keeping others off the net. Few people can afford to do a DoS attack against a machine where the slowest link is a T3. (Which a good hosting company will probably have just to deal with the bandwidth normally seen)
OpenBSD didn't audit FreeBSD's code. IIRC, OpenBSD was a split of the NetBSD project. FreeBSD had already been started, and was using a separate source tree.
My personal opinion is that welfare _is_ a huge waste of money if government doesn't provide decent education for the same category of people -- people that are poor and ignorant will remain poor if they will remain ignorant. It isn't hard to build a good government-sponsored (because certainly no one else will sponsor such a thing) educational system that can provide well-designed curriculum, and is open to all people that are capable of learning. I am doing just fine after studying in Russia where such a thing was implemented, and so can most of other people, poor or not. It only requires some smart teachers that write courses and teach students, and some smart politicians that write laws and allocate money for it... Oh, I forgot, we are in US -- now I see the problem.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
You are wrong!!! OpenBSD code never came from NetBSD, OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD, and as a matter of fact, FreeBSD has borrowed more codes from OpenBSD than OpenBSD has done from FreeBSD. Partially because OpenBSD finds the bug firsts and FreeBSD copies, OpenBSD implments advanced crypto funtionality which other BSD's borrow. The place where OpenBSD is trying to borrow from FreeBSD now is SMP support.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Guns are the tool of the righteous man, allowing one to defend oneself against the depredations of a society increasingly consumed by such capitalist ills as poverty, atheism and drugs. Thanks to the liberal pro-"freedom" mindset that pervades our government, corporations led by greedmongers and Satanists lead the way to the corruption of the weaker elements of society, leaving a wake of gang violence, crack addicts and hardneded criminals, all of whome require dealing with in the harshest way by concerned Christians.
That's what your problem is in the UK - you don't have the courage to do your part for your country and for God. Removing the dead wood of society is your duty as both a Christian and as a man.
There are two ways to tamper with an election (exept for the usual unholy game called election campaign)
a) You either try to cheat outright, replacing notes with "Guy X" printed on them with notes with "Guy Y" (or flood the booth with "Guy Y" votes, or rig the lists or counting) or
b) You disturb the election itself. Making it difficult for your opponents suspected supporters to vote.
Real life meatspace voting is not so easy to disturb. Sure, you can cause a lot of trouble, but to seriously affect the outcome of an election, you must have lots of people with you messing vith voting booths all over the country. That means to pull it off you must be big enough to be an important political factor anyway.
Online voting may be more sensitive to tampering than traditional voting since a single cracker, with or without a political agenda, might try to alter the results (method a) or simply DoS the voting server (method b).
Now the best way to counter this threat would be to large number of voting servers, each taking votes from a random subset of the population. This way one successful cracker attempt will be a nuisance, like a single bomb threat on election day, but will hardly have any affect on the overall results.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Frankly, the more I read about Ralph Nader, the less I trust him with anything more modern than a spoon.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Yes, I think it's amusing to see who is running what. :>
I think I'm going to make netcraft my homepage.
Maybe politicians just feel comfortable with the innocent looking devil logo?
PigPog.
setup nat
have no exploitable services on the firewall box
install tracking software
go one step beyond and use a floppy firewall settup see
http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
that way there is no way to save permenent changes
if it was comprimised .
The key being nothing running to
exploit and no tools or room for tools if it is.
could even be done using winblows problem is its allot harder to strip
windows down of all unsecure services/software.
BSD/OS is a large commercial Unix. $3-4k. You pay for the source. It's (obviously) BSD licensed.
Do you really think that they understand free(dom) software with this sort of statement (about Y2K)? Do they understand what GPL/BSDL is about, or did the techs set up the server, picking what they thought would be best for the job? (i.e. a very secure OS that is very likely to be attacked)
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
Or are they talking about something else entirely?
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
I dunno about anyone else, but I have long ago written off those two parties. They may be the major parties right now, but they're irrelevant to me.
--
Okay, that's fine. I personally use Debian GNU/Linux because I believe in Free Software. Just because you're pragmatic doesn't mean everyone else should be.
Imagine Ralph Nader pondering night after night over what OS should he choose for his campaign website server?
Not Nader personally, but I could imagine a campaign staffer or volunteer chose Free Software because it agrees with the Reform Party's ideas (note: I'm not American, and the only American party I know anything about is the Libertarian Party. If the Reform Party are really a bunch of authoritarian dictators, then they're being hypocritical).
That a politician is using a certain operating system for his campaign?
What's wrong with that? Not all politicians are corrupt; besides, as you say, this choice may have been entirely based on the technical quality of BSD. Hosting a political website that has to serve lots of traffic while under constant attack is a fairly strenous test. Just like hosting the website of any large company, I think this is an event the BSD community can be proud of.
How amazingly we see some "polemic people" using "polemic software"
- www.scientology.org is running
WebSitePro/2.5.4 on NT4 or Windows 98
- www.hitlerisgod.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/4.1 on Windows 2000
And also some weird surprises--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
One thing to learn very quickly in polytics is every politician is a micro dictator.
They dictate everything from server policy to office methidology.
Anything a canidate can do himself he will do himself.
No some hippy did NOT pick server policy. If there is some hippy running the servers he was hand picked by the canidate himself. Not the best person for the job but a volintear the canidate himself feels good about. In short only way you'll get a hippy tech is from a hippy canidate...
Micro dictators meaning they fight the urge and they know better but they WANT to Micromanage. They can't. But anything they can dabble with they will.
The first thing that happend when the servers went up was the canidate himself picked the os. Windows for the Republicans becouse the worlds richest corpration makes the best operating systems. It runs on from there.
Server policy is very much idilogicly defined and the idilog making those choices is the canidate himself. Not the SysAdm.. who is most likely a volintear with a similer world view...
Canidates do this becouse let's face it.. voters do what Slashdot is doing. Every step every look every blink must present the canidates agenda. They can not allow some kid to pick the system if say Linux dosn't say of the canidate all the canidate wants.
One area where libertarians and the green party agree is on poverty. They don't agree on solutions but they agree a dramaticly diffrent policy on poverty is nessisary. In that they disagree with the Republicans and Democrats ideas on addressing poverty.
A classic addatude BTW is "AntiPoor" means "Disagrees with my solution".
The Republicans DO have a solution for poverty. You may find it distastful and wrong and just plain stupid but it's clearly not "throw them to the wolfs". Thow some conservitive Republicans I've talked to do feel poverty is not an issue to address.. they have the "if they weren't lazy they wouldn't be poor" addatude it dosn't accually boil down so simply however it's compatable with the sentiment. Probably better said "If they work really hard they won't be poor for long" a bit more of an enlightend view suggesting that poverty itself is a sign of hard times and hard times are overcome with hard work.
It's a good idea. But it takes more than that. I do believe hard work is part of the over all solution but it's going to take some leadership to convence the poor to work hard and give them a target to work for. Not workfair or any such simple minded goals. But now I'm politicing and my ideals arn't running so I'll shut up on that for now.
The Democrats want to use governemt policys. This is ok. Help programs etc. The addatude here is "Only by government can anything be done" a absolutly wrong addatude.
This policy can work becouse the governemnt can get things done. But by far this is not the only posable solution.
Libertarians (at least the ones I talked to) want to solve the homeless problem with non-proffits. Many Democrats and Republicans also view this as a good solution.
Also preposed for local enforcment was zoning areas where homeless can set up tents or home made structures. Such policys are not populare and may be very short sited. This policy gets most of it's support from the green and libertarian partys. It gets NO support from the Democrats or Republicans.
Back to my politicing. My personal favorate policy is to take money going to the welfair burrocracy and send it out to non-proffits in the form of governemnt grants. This is becouse non-proffits have a better success rate for getting poor into work. They have more comprehensive programs. They do trainning etc. They find the needs of the poor and addapt accordingly.
One non-proffit I know asked why people had a hard time getting work. The answer.. they couldn't present themselvs properly. They came to the interviews dressed improperly they didn't have a mailing address that sort of problem.
I don't actually exist.
I don't visit K5 much but it's intresting you've read so much on Slashdot about poverty considering Slashdot amd K5 are tech forums and poverty never comes up byond some fears that the poor don't have access to technology. But thats all consern for the poor and you say no such exists so no such debate could exist thus no conversaion and nothing on Slashdot to read.
You are eather a troll or reading with a nurological filter and see only what you want to see. Both are strong posabilitys. But the posability your arguments are valid are nill
I don't actually exist.
I sense another case of "operating system bigotry" here. Using Linux/BSD doesn't make a candidate good or bad; perhaps they only picked an "alternative" OS to attract techy geeks. And I doubt the candidates themselves have much of a clue about operating systems... such choices are made by staffers.
It may surpise the zealots of Slahsdot, but there are legitimate and sound reasons for running a Microsoft product. If Slashdot truly advocates freedom, then it shouldn't look down on someone who makes a choice that differs from the "party line."
Freedom only works if everyone is free...
All about me
I don't visit K5 much but it's intresting you've read so much on Slashdot about poverty considering Slashdot amd K5 are tech forums and poverty never comes up byond some fears that the poor don't have access to technology.
Of course, apart from the story "Poverty in America" which was on kuro5hin about a week before it went down. There was plenty of the kind of thing I'm talking about under that story.
I think you are a bit misinformed. Ralph Nader
is the candidate for the Green Party. He is also
a huge consumer advocate is partially responsible for bringing the Microsoft anti-trust trial to
court(as early as 1997). The "parent" hosting site, http://www.essential.org, hosts other "progressive"
sites as well. After reading through some of the
web sites, it becomes clear that free software probably is a political issue for them as well as
performance issue. Please read up on the subject before commenting.
First, "Nader and the rest of his Libertarians" sounds very funny considering that he is not Libertarian but Green. Second, why do you think that slashdot users are against poor people? Because some weirdo said few days ago that geeks are libertarians?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I just wonder if the fact that OpenBSD is a 'Canada based' OS could have an incidence on the aceptance of this OS by US administration/politics. I mean here in France the army was very suspicious about Windows 95/NT as it was a foreign OS (and of course as there were no sources available...) I also wonder how it was configured for the crypto related stuff... :-)
With all this mess on the patents and allowed-only-outside-the-US-libs do they follow the law
or do they use (IMHO stronger) export libs ?
Libertarians are NOT anti-poor. Libertarians don't want to throw people to the wolves. Libertarians believe the government IS the wolf!
Libertarians want to help the poor at the local level. They don't want the federal government taking all your money to Washington with the hope that they will give it back to your community.
If you believe the federal welfare state actually helps the poor, vote for some other party.
It's called competition.
Eh...
I'm sure if online voting were implemented in larger elections we would see a many more attacks, and from many more people. I'm sure there are plenty of other organizations that would to effect American (or any other nation for that matter) elections. I wonder if this won't be the biggest obstacle to online voting.
If we were to implement online voting in the US for a national election, I wonder if it would even be technically possible due to the sheer number of attacks sure to come.
The reasoning that "if a company's, or a party's, webserver runs BSD, they must believe in Free Software" is a hugely incorrect one. They may be using BSD because it is the best to meet their needs, and my be totally ignoring the Free Software issue. Do not read too much into queso.
you have a point...
but thats true of any os.
a floppy/cdrom based settup is just another step closer to being secure.
If your webserver has a hole in it you have worse problems than what
firewall your running.
Im curious there is a shutdown executable
in bin or sbin of the distros i
looked at there isnt in floppyfw
I will have to attach a keyboard to my firewall
and see if shutdown -h now works without
shutdown being installed.
As far as dos attacks if you dont have your routers
configured properly to deny them your screwed no matter what os you run.
If your referring to the windows oob attack that
can be caught at the firewall
level on windows or at the router.
security isnt a one step process you
have to do the whole settup with security
in mind it is no stronger than the weekest link.
Second Rule of Slash Club: Don't talk about Slash Club
Third Rule of Slash Club: New users will be Karma Whores
Fourth Rule of Slash Club: You must bash Microsoft at every oppertunity
Try popping a few facts to back up your statement, or maybe check out The Issues if you don't have any.
On the other hand... I mean, is that really a good argument for you? That a politician is using a certain operating system for his campaign?
Like, you trust them?
Best regards,
January
Libertarians don't hate the poor. In fact, Libertarians believe in a government that would ignore the poor (no social security, no fair education) to protect the wealthy (only police and justice).
Uhhh.. Nader is the canidate for the Green Party, not the Libertarians. There's a big difference there..
Dispite that, I agree that this was more of a lucky decision to pick a host with brains more than a political move.
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Does it matter what platform any one of the candidates uses? Is there anyone here so closed minded that the politics of the candidate will take a back seat to the politics of Operating System choice?
Then again, I don't know which candidate is the lesser evil. Perhaps this is the only fair way to call it...