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Google Submits Patent Application For Online Voting (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has outlined a concept for real-time online voting in the Google home page in a patent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Entitled 'Social Voting-Based Campaigns in Search', the application proposes a voting user interface (VUI) that will enable a user to submit one or more votes in a voting-based campaign, giving the hypothetical example of a campaign to vote for the 'Top American Singer', with users authenticated via Google log-ins. If implemented, the system would represent a new foray for Google into generating rather than recording analytics and metrics of popularity.
I, for one, support the new O.D.I.N. president!
This would be great for voting down stupid patents.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Requires a Google+ account.
thank goodness for that. no chance of fraud there, mates.
is that google pretty much has to patent anything obvious that hasn't been patented yet (e.g. one-click buying) or some troll patents it ("voting--using a computer"). When google patents the digitally enabled iGloo it will come with a patent on method for wiping your ass without dropping your android in the portapotty.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I don't like where this is going.
Have gnu, will travel.
Online voting has been around forever.
They're not patenting "online voting", they've submitted a patent for a particular approach to online voting.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
We have seen how voting can be changed with "trusted" computers and e-voting. Once a bit gets flipped, nobody will know about it. Online voting means that we can now add untrusted computers to the mix, and the next round of malware will go for this.
How about something actually secure? David Chaum has a verifiable means of voting. What is so wrong with paper ballots? No, they are not 100% secure, but it is a lot harder to get physical access to ballots to change entries than it is to add a few lines of code into a device's firmware, or have added functionality on a CPU mask that wasn't specified by the designers, but placed by the fab, just to change an election result.
Elections are too important to have them be "vote early, vote often" concepts. This isn't electing the next American Idol... this is a function critical to how a government works, and should be treated as such.
And if it's a vote Google feels should go a certain way, they can be sure to emphasize the poll to those who their analytics say will vote the right way.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Yet another process patent?!?? Hmm, this gives me an idea.
I'm going to file a patent for going to the grocery store in a 4-door vehicle. Of course I'll have to file more patents to cover variant scenarios such as with or without a spare tire on board, 5th door, 2WD, 4WD and AWD. Almost forgot about manual and automatic transmissions. I'll set up a business address in Texas which will look good when I take legal action against those evil infring-ers. GRRRRRR!
There are vaguely smart people here in Slashdot. At this point, I'm comfortable saying that there's NO mass-electronic voting system I'd want to adopt. The attack surface is too high, the rewards for a successful intrusion or intentional modification by the controlling interests are too high, and the benefits are too low.
Electronic voting is fine in small cases, where the number of votes is so low that it's not worth a massive effort to break.
If it's connected, it can be hacked. If it's electronic, it can be modified. Even WORM/DVD-burning systems can be altered via firmware that's not writing what you think it's writing (and falsely spits back info on a "read" to fool at-moment auditing).
You know what humans are good at securing? Little pieces of paper, often with Presidents on them. Usually it involves guns. Doing it at scale requires scaling up your investment. Altering the contents of one polling station's box doesn't mean you've also altered the contents of the other 85,000 that also have ballots. Intrusion is limited by physical restraints. And usually is easy to spot after-the-fact.
It definitely doesn't involve glibc bugs, Romanian hackers (or the State of Romania), and trusting the political process to the cloud.
No thanks.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
As a side-bar to their search page? I'm pretty sure Wordpress and a billion other CMS systems have that already.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
You're pretty sure because you've looked at the wording in the patents?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
It could be simply a slander act of mine by arguing this will lead us to know there is in fact election fraud even in the most powerful (but not so much anymore) nation of the world.
Go on guys, please. I'll be glad this could happen.
(and yes, I don't work with people who needs pets or toys inside their office, I'm a fucking adult, the fact I'm unemployed is a social problem, not mine)
On Things That Do Not Matter - VOTTDONOM
And allowing analytics to further define your profile....
And allowing the Guvmint to further define yor profile...
And allowing advertisers to further define your profile...
and wasting your time with a push ( or pull ) to see the results of said Voting On Things That Do Not Matter...
One minute at a time your life will be wasted away....
So how much are you going to charge them to vote?
Will there be a cowboy neal option?
Come for the voting, stay for the data collection!
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Alexa, vote no! Alexa, stop! Alexa, vote no!
I've been here a while now, and yet I'm still amazed at how many people don't even get past the headline before they have to post (or moderate) a rant almost entirely unrelated to the actual news.
Am I newer here than I thought, is everyone just yelling from their lawns, or has the level of buried rage around here really increased so much?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Wouldn't this just be an example of a multi-question survey? Such systems have existed for decades. Even Compuserve had a version of it. How would voting for the Top American Singer be any different than voting for a product to list on Massdrop?
It's a side bar (or """Knowledge Panel""" (my fingers are doing the quote thing)) to the results page, but only if you searched for a term and/or got results related to whatever the voting campaign is about. It's not directly the voting they're patenting, it's the combination of searching for something to vote on (whether you intended to or not) and getting a panel where you can vote on something, then once you've cast your vote, seeing information about whoever you voted for (the claim says specifically "social items" from the "social networking profiles associated with the particular contestant").
Since this is almost all in one single, massive claim, it's not just patenting "voting in a sidebar". It's probably even novel. Now, whether the patent is nonobvious or even performs the required disclosure to allow someone to put the patent into practice (how does it decide if you're searching for something related? How does it detect social networking profiles?)... that's a question for someone with a million dollars to burn in court.
They will patent filling out forms, and require the entire internet use Google Forms or pay royalties.