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To Deter Foreign Hackers, Some States May Also Be Deterring Voters (npr.org)
A number of states are blocking web traffic from foreign countries to their voter registration websites, making the process harder for some U.S. citizens who live overseas to vote, despite the practice providing no real security benefits. From a report: On its face, the "geo-targeting" of foreign countries may seem like a solid plan: election officials around the country are concerned about foreign interference after Russia's efforts leading up to the 2016 election, so blocking traffic to election websites from outside the United States might seem like an obvious defense starting point. But cybersecurity experts and voting rights advocates say it's an ineffective solution that any hacker could easily sidestep using a virtual private network, or VPN, a commonly-used and easily-available service. Such networks allow for a computer user to use the Internet and appear in a different location than they actually are.
Seems like the only thing something like this would do is deter voters. Hackers know better. This is a perfect case and point as to why people who don't understand computers, networks, or the internet shouldn't be making rules that govern it.
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Yes we want to be sure people who are allowed to vote should be able to vote. We don't want people who are not allowed to vote to be able to vote.
However the current trend of interference in the election isn't hacking the system and casting fake votes. But from foreign groups working hard to make us distrust our neighbor, who happens to have a different view of politics. And Radicalize you and them to prevent consensus to actually move forward.
If you are left of center, anyone right of you are racist bible thumping bigots who will avoid all science, and would let the world die just as long the GDP stays positive.
If you are right of center, anyone left of you are spoiled brats who just want freebees without contributing to society. Who would let society collapse just to save a tree.
We should know that both depictions isn't true for either group, while they may have some people who may go to those levels. However most people will be more reasonable when faced with the actual issues. But the media combined with other groups trying to egg on these differences really cause people to take sides, once they take sides, they will move from near the center and more firmly into the stupid Territory of their particular political leanings.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
All this bitching about needing ID's to vote is insane, no other country in the world is stupid enough to relax the voting requirements as much as some states do...
It's a great reason to have the state system the U.S. does, so the stupidity of one states voting system can only spread so far.
Before we can even talk about different kinds of elections in the U.S., we really need to firm up voting security across the board.
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once again, this is just good 'ole fashion voter suppression.
For my money I want to see voting made mandatory, like Jury Duty. That would be the best way to end voter suppression. Also move voting to Saturday or Sunday and/or make it a national holiday with mandatory pay. Oh, and I don't care if you're convicted of a crime or even currently in prison. _Everyone_ gets to vote. If America has so many Ax Murders and child molesters they can swing an election maybe we should fix that first before worrying about who gets to vote...
Of course, our ruling class isn't going to allow that. Sad thing is there's a portion of Americans who really believe we should stop the "wrong" people from voting. I get the racists and why they feel that way, I even get the nutters who want to repeal the 19th amendment. But then you get regular folk who just have some vague notion of who the "wrong" people are that they can't put it in words that I can't explain. Maybe they get it from right wing talk radio, I don't know. Either way it's messed up.
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How do you know you have security experts who have not kept up their skills and craft? They agree with the above report.
As has been shown in many reports and presentation in security conferences that yes it is easy to get around but it is one of the best way of dropping the number of scans, script kiddies, basic attack attempts, etc done against a system. That small cost is still a barrier, it will not stop some state run APT but it stop a large amount of those people running armitage against you and fillin up your logs and requiring some time to deal with. It also has no negative consequences if you are not doing business to those countries.
He didn't say "Obama" - he said Homeland Security and they DID attempt to infiltrate their systems along with several other states.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/0...
Ostensibly it could be argued that they were "testing" the security but that's not been confirmed one way or the other or why they didn't bother notifying the states when they got in that their security was compromised.
Interesting also that this story just went away after the election.
No, you ended up with Trump for a few simple reasons:
1. Republican voters were so sick of establishment politicians who routinely stab us in the back that we were willing to flip the coin and say "heads we win, tails we burn your house down" to the GOPe.
2. The Democrats ran a candidate who could lose a popularity contest to Elizabeth Bathory at an all female middle school.
By "interefering", do they mean crackers breaking into online voter servers? Or just posting opinions and the like in social media?
If the latter, that hardly "interfering". Just voicing opinions. Double-plus good oh my brother!
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Personally, I prefer for decisions to be made by people who have at least *some* interest or knowledge of the subject.
The majority of Americans don't have enough interest in civics to even know who the current vice president is. That's fine, it doesn't mean they are stupid; they just prefer to spend their time on attention on other things.
If someone is interested in botany and knows all about which plants grow well here, I want them to help decide what to plant. If they don't even know who their current senator *is*, how could they possibly judge the senator's performance? They can't in any useful way, of course. At best, they might see a 140 character Twitter "vote for Sheesa Crook - do it for the plants".
Page 1 of any economics textbook will introduce the two main branches of economics. Most Americans don't know the two main branches, the stuff from page 1, so how the heck can they make informed decisions about national economic policy? They can't, of course. They can only vote based on a bumper sticker.
I'd prefer if all the people running around saying "everybody needs to vote" would switch to saying "everybody should learn a about civics so they can make informed voting decisions".
You disagree? Think about some of the people who have been elected lately, because people vote without having a clue about the policies each candidate represents.
I constantly have this problem with Michigan, while living in Japan.
Pay my quarterly estimated taxes? Website blocked
Pay my business LLC fee? Website blocked
Register for an absentee ballot? Website blocked
It's a constant battle to call people late at night when it's early morning there. And there answer is just to clear my cache or try a different browser.
After long battles, I managed to reach the right IT people in some of the departments and get some of the access enabled. But it seems like each department has a different IT contact and I wasn't able to get the business department people to understand the problem still. I'm pretty sure they're still firewalling all non-US IPs for "security"
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