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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.
This would be great for voting down stupid patents.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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.
Chicago, of course!
boy would they love to know your political leanings for ad sales...and to complete your Google Dossier.
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,
This is for opinion polls, not actual elections. And some stuff allows more than one vote. America's Got Talent, for instance, allows up to 10 votes per method (online - using your Google signon, I believe - text and 800 call) in the audience vote rounds.
Since getting extra votes on Google accounts is as simple as installing multiple browsers, or just going in to private browsing mode, it's so obviously unsuitable for anything that matters that even the government can figure it out.
Read the patent. It's not about voting for presidents or anything like that; it's not about elections. It's literally for people voting on things like "Top American Singer" on social networks and such. It's not designed to prevent voting fraud or anything of that nature... it's really just a fancy description of a webpoll.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.