The Reality Dysfuntion had so many doomsday devices (the amok humans, the device, swarms of nukes, Lanton's stunts) I lost count (and I've only read the first book in the series).
Not to spoil anything, but there's one hell of a doomsday device at the end. Plus a couple more along the way... and why the heck haven't you read the last two yet?
The insecurity of the client is possibly the biggest problem, but is solvable. The use of a pre-encrypted ballot (where each candidate / option in a contest is assigned a 4 digit code unique to the voter), ensures that a man-in-the-middle or trojan can't inspect the vote (it's a 4 digit number) or alter it (can't tell what to change it to). We're very keen to trial the system over here, which is what the pilots are all about, figuring out what people can and can't do / will and won't accept.
Voting in the UK is only anonymous whilst the ballot is cast. Every ballot is numbered and the number is written against your name on the electoral roll. Weird UK law that most people don't know about, but it's been very effective in detering personation.
Never said they didn't exist, I'm very well aware of how easy it is to subvert a traditional ballot (been listening to the people who run elections in the UK). But the standards must be significantly higher for electronic voting to be adopted, because of a number of peoples objections. Don't get me wrong about this, I'm all in favour of electronic voting if it can be made to work to these high standards and I'm working to ensure that it will.
One of the points with coercion / vote selling and e-voting systems with receipt systems is that an attacker (the person buying the vote / forcing you to vote a particular way) can guarantee that you did what they told you to. Secret paper ballots don't have this unless the guy with the gun to your head walks into the polling booth with you (which he can't, at least not here).
So yes, traditional ballots have their problems, and we can fix some of these with e-voting systems, but we need to make damn sure we don't make the situation any worse.
What about voter verifiability? Auditing? Fake receipts (because someone will print them to dispute the election). One mediocre programmer can't build this... I say that with some certainty because this guy tried and failed, such that he's convinced that because he can't build it no one can (yeah right, I can't fly a helicopter... does that mean no one can?) and he's traveling the country telling anyone that will listen it's unpossible.
You can't have exactly who was voted for on the receipt given to the voter. Coercion and vote selling are enabled by having this on the receipt, so you can't have it on the website either. The manual recount through the internal receipts is valid... but if anyone gains access to this you've got a nice list of who voted for who (assuming you can tie the UUID back).
One mechanism around this not to include the who was voted for on the receipts/public db, but use some anonymous value (displayed to the voter when voting). Unfortunately you can't then verify the count using the receipts as you don't know who was voted for.
I wasn't going for a moral equivalence between the US and Saddams Iraq. Domestic repression in Iraq was obviously far worse then the repression in the US at the moment. On an international scale things are a little different though.
This is besides my point.
My point was history didn't start on 9/11. I watched the first war in Iraq on TV as a child, it was rightly called the "Nintendo War", the footage from the military didn't show people dying, there were no mentions of the casualties we caused. Now as an adult I realise exactly what we did out there, to say I'm outraged is an understatement. I feel sick to the core knowing how much blood we spilled for our ends. And now I have this other view I can see that war the way that arabs and muslims around the world must have seen it. And now I know why they hate us so much. They were outraged at the time, but we couldn't / didn't want to hear them.
How about watching the systematic destruction of an industrialised nation on TV for months on end, but never once seeing the bodies of the thousands of people who died?
Or watching people CHEER as we started up the bombing for a second time?
I know Saddam was a brutual dictator who crushed ALL opposition in Iraq, but that doesn't justify the deaths of nearly 3 million Iraqis over the course of 10 years. Not that we complained when his presence served our (the US & the UKs) purpose as a handy counter-balance to the terrifying idea of an Islamic Iran. But hey, why look to the past when we can pretend that all history started on 9/11?
I think you'll find that Click Monkeys site is a load of bollocks... search Google for the "founder" Sidney Zwibel, loads of mande up nonsense. Gotta love the petsorfood.com site and all the others taken in by it. You eventually wind up at this story here where our intrepid Sidney is some kind of surgeon / cowboy. All very odd.
I really hope you didn't think Click Monkeys was real, set off my BS alarm almost immediately.
You're right about the commercial software bit, check out his "blog", exclusively made up of links to http://www.dekart.com/ who make a product that is a direct competitor... someone's been suckling at the MS teat. Hmmmm FUD.
Unless people have started pissing crude oil recently and I've just been too wrapped in myself to notice this, the average person can't produce basic raw materials. Finished goods, yes (or rather they can maintain the machine that makes the goods).
And let's not forget the estimated 1 - 1.5 Million who have died in Iraq before this war. Admittedly we have to blame the whole of the UN Security Council for this, probably the reason that no one ever seems to mention it. 500,000+ children dying, women bleeding to death after C-sections, Doctors having to choose which child gets oxygen and which dies (because the electricty supply is shot and there's not enough power to produce all the O2 needed).
What's happening now is merely the end of a very, very long game in which the people of Iraq have been the losers. And Americans wonder why they didn't greet you with open arms when you arrived?
How about the 1.5 million Iraqis that have died since 1991? Warfare doesn't always have to be guns and bombs (tho' it's far more impressive when it is), economic sanctions can kill thousands without anyone even having to notice/care/protest/think. (please note : I'm British and acknowledge just how much blood we have on our hands in Iraq, hell if we hadn't carved up the Middle East in the first place Iraq wouldn't have had to invade Kuwait.)
And that is the problem. What's the answer? I point out to people (that I hear say something daft on the subject) that the people dying in Iraq right now, and the millions who have died before, they're innocent people just like the rest of us. The same basic hopes, dreams, fears and needs.
"Dehumanising the victim makes things simpler, It's like breathing through a respirator. It eases the conscience of even the most conscious and calculating violator."
"Language of Violence" The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprosy
and
"They're not a part of the same human race that the rest of us are." - Unknown American Military Personnel (Gulf War I)
Whilst we're on the subject let's not forget the estimated 1.5 million that Britain and America have let die in Iraq over the last 13 years as economic sanctions denied ordinary Iraqis access to the most basic of modern amenities.
Nor that during the first Gulf war we allowed an industrialised nation to be bombed back into the fucking stone age for trying to take back land that the British denied them with an arbitary line in the sand (post Ottaman empire).
Nearly every member of the international community has the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on their hands. Out damn spot.
And we wonder why they didn't welcome the US troops when they drove their fucking tanks in.
Not so much the idea of protecting children, as offended at the idea that someone else other than their parents should be protecting them.
I'm the father of a 3 year old girl and I know it's MY responsiblity to keep her safe in this world. No one elses. It's not up to some anonymous company to invent some fallable 'system' to fool parents into a false sense of security.
On second thoughts...
Let them build it, let the kids (in the US at least) use it. Then when one child is abused after circumvention of the system, wait for the lynch-mob to descend on the manufacturers.
Agreed. The BBC does seem to following a lot of the commerical stations trends in terms of the "dumbing-down" of content.
I'm constantly sickened by the amount of money they spend on special effects in freeling documentaries when they add little to the subject. Get on with making informative programming and leave the shinies to Hollywood.
P.S. The prospect of Alistair Cookes Undead Letters From America fills me with a warm glow though!
Seriously, are you watching the same channel as the rest of us? Unless it's an advert clip-show that crops up sometimes, the only adverts on the BBC are for the corporations own content.
I assume we're talking UK here, because I don't have either, and I'm not required to have either. The issue is when we have a system that it's impossible to opt-out from.
Slashdot Mirror
The Reality Dysfuntion had so many doomsday devices (the amok humans, the device, swarms of nukes, Lanton's stunts) I lost count (and I've only read the first book in the series).
Not to spoil anything, but there's one hell of a doomsday device at the end. Plus a couple more along the way... and why the heck haven't you read the last two yet?
He's on Fasthosts:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/30/fasthost_hack_update/
The insecurity of the client is possibly the biggest problem, but is solvable. The use of a pre-encrypted ballot (where each candidate / option in a contest is assigned a 4 digit code unique to the voter), ensures that a man-in-the-middle or trojan can't inspect the vote (it's a 4 digit number) or alter it (can't tell what to change it to). We're very keen to trial the system over here, which is what the pilots are all about, figuring out what people can and can't do / will and won't accept.
Voting in the UK is only anonymous whilst the ballot is cast. Every ballot is numbered and the number is written against your name on the electoral roll. Weird UK law that most people don't know about, but it's been very effective in detering personation.
Unless dad demanded some proof... say a photo of the ballot paper taken with a camera phone.
Never said they didn't exist, I'm very well aware of how easy it is to subvert a traditional ballot (been listening to the people who run elections in the UK). But the standards must be significantly higher for electronic voting to be adopted, because of a number of peoples objections. Don't get me wrong about this, I'm all in favour of electronic voting if it can be made to work to these high standards and I'm working to ensure that it will.
One of the points with coercion / vote selling and e-voting systems with receipt systems is that an attacker (the person buying the vote / forcing you to vote a particular way) can guarantee that you did what they told you to. Secret paper ballots don't have this unless the guy with the gun to your head walks into the polling booth with you (which he can't, at least not here).
So yes, traditional ballots have their problems, and we can fix some of these with e-voting systems, but we need to make damn sure we don't make the situation any worse.
What about voter verifiability? Auditing? Fake receipts (because someone will print them to dispute the election). One mediocre programmer can't build this... I say that with some certainty because this guy tried and failed, such that he's convinced that because he can't build it no one can (yeah right, I can't fly a helicopter... does that mean no one can?) and he's traveling the country telling anyone that will listen it's unpossible.
You can't have exactly who was voted for on the receipt given to the voter. Coercion and vote selling are enabled by having this on the receipt, so you can't have it on the website either. The manual recount through the internal receipts is valid... but if anyone gains access to this you've got a nice list of who voted for who (assuming you can tie the UUID back).
One mechanism around this not to include the who was voted for on the receipts/public db, but use some anonymous value (displayed to the voter when voting). Unfortunately you can't then verify the count using the receipts as you don't know who was voted for.
Fun this one isn't it?
Sorry, can't post that sort of thing publicly, opens the system up to coercion and vote selling.
I wasn't going for a moral equivalence between the US and Saddams Iraq. Domestic repression in Iraq was obviously far worse then the repression in the US at the moment. On an international scale things are a little different though.
This is besides my point.
My point was history didn't start on 9/11. I watched the first war in Iraq on TV as a child, it was rightly called the "Nintendo War", the footage from the military didn't show people dying, there were no mentions of the casualties we caused. Now as an adult I realise exactly what we did out there, to say I'm outraged is an understatement. I feel sick to the core knowing how much blood we spilled for our ends. And now I have this other view I can see that war the way that arabs and muslims around the world must have seen it. And now I know why they hate us so much. They were outraged at the time, but we couldn't / didn't want to hear them.
We can hear them now.
How about watching the systematic destruction of an industrialised nation on TV for months on end, but never once seeing the bodies of the thousands of people who died?
Or watching people CHEER as we started up the bombing for a second time?
I know Saddam was a brutual dictator who crushed ALL opposition in Iraq, but that doesn't justify the deaths of nearly 3 million Iraqis over the course of 10 years. Not that we complained when his presence served our (the US & the UKs) purpose as a handy counter-balance to the terrifying idea of an Islamic Iran. But hey, why look to the past when we can pretend that all history started on 9/11?
Far easier that way.
I think you'll find that Click Monkeys site is a load of bollocks... search Google for the "founder" Sidney Zwibel, loads of mande up nonsense. Gotta love the petsorfood.com site and all the others taken in by it. You eventually wind up at this story here where our intrepid Sidney is some kind of surgeon / cowboy. All very odd.
I really hope you didn't think Click Monkeys was real, set off my BS alarm almost immediately.
You're right about the commercial software bit, check out his "blog", exclusively made up of links to http://www.dekart.com/ who make a product that is a direct competitor... someone's been suckling at the MS teat. Hmmmm FUD.
Unless people have started pissing crude oil recently and I've just been too wrapped in myself to notice this, the average person can't produce basic raw materials. Finished goods, yes (or rather they can maintain the machine that makes the goods).
And let's not forget the estimated 1 - 1.5 Million who have died in Iraq before this war. Admittedly we have to blame the whole of the UN Security Council for this, probably the reason that no one ever seems to mention it. 500,000+ children dying, women bleeding to death after C-sections, Doctors having to choose which child gets oxygen and which dies (because the electricty supply is shot and there's not enough power to produce all the O2 needed).
What's happening now is merely the end of a very, very long game in which the people of Iraq have been the losers. And Americans wonder why they didn't greet you with open arms when you arrived?
Whilst I doubt his claims, Clint(on) Curtis has been making waves about Yang/Feeney for years.
Google cache
Informed Volusian
How about the 1.5 million Iraqis that have died since 1991? Warfare doesn't always have to be guns and bombs (tho' it's far more impressive when it is), economic sanctions can kill thousands without anyone even having to notice/care/protest/think. (please note : I'm British and acknowledge just how much blood we have on our hands in Iraq, hell if we hadn't carved up the Middle East in the first place Iraq wouldn't have had to invade Kuwait.)
And that is the problem. What's the answer? I point out to people (that I hear say something daft on the subject) that the people dying in Iraq right now, and the millions who have died before, they're innocent people just like the rest of us. The same basic hopes, dreams, fears and needs.
"Dehumanising the victim makes things simpler, It's like breathing through a respirator. It eases the conscience of even the most conscious and calculating violator."
"Language of Violence"
The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprosy
and
"They're not a part of the same human race that the rest of us are." - Unknown American Military Personnel (Gulf War I)
Only as long as the rest of the world is investing in America.
Become more isolationist and the money might dry up.
Whilst we're on the subject let's not forget the estimated 1.5 million that Britain and America have let die in Iraq over the last 13 years as economic sanctions denied ordinary Iraqis access to the most basic of modern amenities.
Nor that during the first Gulf war we allowed an industrialised nation to be bombed back into the fucking stone age for trying to take back land that the British denied them with an arbitary line in the sand (post Ottaman empire).
Nearly every member of the international community has the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on their hands. Out damn spot.
And we wonder why they didn't welcome the US troops when they drove their fucking tanks in.
Go figure.
Not so much the idea of protecting children, as offended at the idea that someone else other than their parents should be protecting them.
I'm the father of a 3 year old girl and I know it's MY responsiblity to keep her safe in this world. No one elses. It's not up to some anonymous company to invent some fallable 'system' to fool parents into a false sense of security.
On second thoughts...
Let them build it, let the kids (in the US at least) use it. Then when one child is abused after circumvention of the system, wait for the lynch-mob to descend on the manufacturers.
Agreed. The BBC does seem to following a lot of the commerical stations trends in terms of the "dumbing-down" of content.
I'm constantly sickened by the amount of money they spend on special effects in freeling documentaries when they add little to the subject. Get on with making informative programming and leave the shinies to Hollywood.
P.S. The prospect of Alistair Cookes Undead Letters From America fills me with a warm glow though!
I second that. We've got Sky @ home and to be honest I only watch BBC One, Two, News 24 or Sky One (for Simpsons and Futurama).
:)
My wife's a slightly different matter, she's been sucked in by the allure of "Lifestyle" programming so she justifies us having Sky
Seriously, are you watching the same channel as the rest of us? Unless it's an advert clip-show that crops up sometimes, the only adverts on the BBC are for the corporations own content.
I assume we're talking UK here, because I don't have either, and I'm not required to have either. The issue is when we have a system that it's impossible to opt-out from.