the thing that makes this voting system great is the public list of all the votes. most attacks are hard against this.
This means one of two things. You might be giving up secret ballots - which keeps getting suggested but is still a bad idea that a sane population won't accept. The other possibility is that you have some complex cryptographic verification protocol that allows you to prove to yourself that your vote was properly counted but not prove to anyone else what your vote was. The latter schemes are neat, but no-one will actually uses them because they're too complicated.
so ok, the system described in these sources is more the latter. It does preserve secrecy. i encrypt my vote, then the election authority re-encrypts my vote. some more stuff is added and we both sign it. We prove that this is what we've done with ZK-proof. Now on the public forum there is my name next to this encrypted vote. i have a copy of this, so i can look on the bulletin board to see that it's there. Furthermore, while I was convinced (or the devices are convinced) that my vote corresponds to this encrypted vote, It is impossible to convince a coercer of these things. i can verify that it's my vote, but i can't decrypt it to prove to the coercer that i voted for anybody in particular.
finally there are many methods to provably decrypt and shuffle this public bulletin, or with homomorphic voting, to just add up and then decrypt these votes.
now i won't argue that these systems are easily understood by your average person, but i think your average person understands the weaknesses of the current system. which would you prefer? you have a system that anybody can see is crap, on the one hand, and a system that cryptographers can see is good, on the other. by the way, i don't include myself in this group of people who understand this stuff. i have only a vague understanding of crypto-voting, but i can see the flow of things. i think there will be a large "intellectual middle class" that can't verify all the finest details of the crypto-voting, but can at least understand it grossly. we shouldn't pretend that it'll be all black magic to everyone but the 10 leaders in the field. maybe those 10 are the only ones who could think it up, but there are tens of thousands who will understand it completely, and there are tens of millions who will basically get it.
now with the weaknesses of paper voting, and the GLARING weaknesses of most electronic voting, we've got to get the word out. i think it's the most democratic option we've got. the entire election can be verified at the end (check the election authority's ZK proof, check the public board) by anybody, with publicly posted information. this power of the public to verify the election is something we haven't even been close to having since we gave up public voting in the 19th century. now with cryptography we could restore the power of auditing to the people without giving up secrecy, and without enabling coercion.
i think we have a duty to begin testing this system, even though the system is complicated and difficult to explain. because really, most people have no idea how elections are run today! any system that's any good at all will not be able to be explained in a 10 second sound bite, and that is the duration of the public's patience for this stuff anyway. here at least those who put in the energy can conclude that the system is impossible (or nearly impossible) to rig.
so i think i've addressed point 1. somewhat. i think that secrecy is preserved, technical transparency is not as good as you think it is now, nor as bad as you imagine under crypto-voting.
as for point 2: yes there are challenges both political and practical in implementing and adopting this system, but they are surmountable, and that is where we should be spending our effort. i'm not privy to the details, but mr. weiss mentions that votehere has come at least near
this thread is now fairly old, but i'll respond anyhow.
i feel like these negative comments i get are in response to some really crappy protocol that i'm not talking about. please actually see what it is that i'm talking about before you poo-poo it.
the thing that makes this voting system great is the public list of all the votes. most attacks are hard against this.
now i propose that each voter needs some sort of 'voting device' that they buy at the store. these devices must be available from multiple vendors, and all information needed to make one from scratch must be available. (the protocol must be open)
if each person has something like this, then they do not need to trust an expert. i will give it my vote, and it will give me an encryption of that vote, as well as a zero-knowledge proof that it is well formed.
the devices would be easily tested in toy 1-vote elections (experts might do these tests). surely no brand of voting-device that failed these tests with any significant regularity would see use.
finally, there is no need to have an expert at every precinct.
each person gets a receipt of their vote. each person can check that their vote is on the public forum.
the election authority provides a proof that the publicly listed encrypted votes have been shuffled, decrypted, and added correctly.
you only need experts to verify 2 things here:
the voting devices
the final adding
now let me close by saying that i agree. my mom having to depend on me or some expert to verify that the election was done right, it doesn't ring true. everyone should be able to personally verify that the vote was done right. the problem is this: while you complain alot, you present no way to make this perfectly trustworthy process possible. here's why: it's REALLY FUCKING HARD! paper ballots systems have huge security problems. a few thousand observers running around the country trying to make sure that nothing funny is happening in any of the multitude of precincts, nor their cars, nor during the counting, nor during the voting, nor anywhere else that we haven't thought of, well it simply doesn't work. look at florida. better yet, read section 9 of the pdf i linked for many examples of the failure of paper voting.
rather than pointing out the minutia that keep cryptovoting from being a perfect graceful flower of divine providence, please help me in recognizing that it is better than anything we have, and in fixing its warts.
P.S. homomorphic voting is actually pretty graceful and floral. check the recommendation in section 7.3 of that pdf i link.
i've mentioned cryptographic voting here before, there seem to be a lot of articles about electronic voting in general these past few months.
i'd like to start by saying that i reject this argument that cryptographic voting should be passed over because not everyone can understand the protocols well enough. My mom might not understand it, but she trusts me, and I understand it, and that should be enough. Maybe not, but maybe trusting me, and my cousin, and all of the newspapers, and all of the political parties, and anybody else, anywhere in the world who feels like it and knows enough, maybe that is enough.
You see, there will by many independent verifiers with cryptovoting, and even if I don't understand exactly how to verify it, it is extremely unlikely that every single independent verifier is lying to me.
furthermore, even if you don't understand the cryptography, you can download "steve's e-vote verifier 2.0." There would be many independently implemented, and competing softwares, and you could pick among them and run it on the published vote proof. i admit that this is a less visceral verification than most people would like, but it is another method that less crypto-savvy voters have to verify the vote. and again, any newspaper or magazine could verify the vote for themselves and publish their approval or disapproval.
beyond verifying that the vote was added correctly, which involves very complicated cryptography. there is the matter of assuring that my vote is cast properly. With cryptovoting there would be a public list of all the people who voted, and all of their (encrypted) votes. i personally encrypt my vote (i must provide a proof that it is properly formatted) and can compare my paper copy of my encrypted vote to the publicly posted vote which is next to my name.
now as far as the paper hand count being auditable by anyone, i call bs. you must be the privileged few who have the political power to do the recount. there is limited access, which makes it much more opaque. with cryptographic voting, the only thing between you and personal verification is the study of math and cryptography. that may be a high hurdle for grandpa, but it's much more democratic than a requirement of privilege.
now the difficulty in explaining cryptovoting does make it hard to sell to people. but that is why we who understand these things should try to get the word out to our less technical friends and family. cryptovoting, done right, would give us unprecedented confidence in our election results.
please read more about cryptovoting, and if you agree with me, get the word out. check out this pdf for a technical description, and this video for another nice one. The video is the lighter of the two. These sources pretty much sum up the total of my knowledge on this stuff. Be warned: a little number theory is required to understand what they're talking about half the time. with that said, even the layman should find much of the video interesting.
interesting. can these demos only be run in windows? i ran some of the ones from 256b.com in dosbox on linux, but they run very slow. what api are they using to effect these visuals? or are they just trying to write directly to a vesa compliant device?
cryptographic voting protocols have gotten much better. All that's left to do is write a nice specification, and implement it. this is hard, but my guess is that it'll be easier than the crypography was.
it's sad, but i i think that diebold (and all other current electronic voting machines) may have soured the public opinion of electronic voting so badly that it will be impossible to convince people that cryptographic voting is any good, and cryptovoting was already hard to sell because it's tough to explain how it works.
we need to get the word out on cryptovoting though. it could raise the level of control people have over elections to an unprecedented height. let your less geeky friends know that you think it's good.
that is, if you DO think it's good. may i offer this pdf as a good place to start. also this video is very nice, and seemingly a little more up to date.
Cryptographic voting is pretty strong now. We should employ it. I read this pdf a couple of days ago and the system that is recommended in section 7.3 seems practicable with current technology and protocols.
The paper is pretty technical (which is good), but sections 8 and 9 are good reading for anybody(even the impatient person) who wants to see existing voting technology get the smackdown.
As far as I know there is not any strong evidence that CRIA has done anything yet. The server is down, true, but I heard it's just a hard drive failure. Some demonoid people were complaining about the bad journalism reporting that the CRIA shut down demonoid, without anybody from demonoid saying this. Who is the source on this? Some nu.nl article? How do they know anything? Here is an IRC log where demonoid staff give the torrentfreak admin a hard time for reprinting the nu.nl story about the CRIA without having confirmed it in any way. To be fair, at this point in time, the torrentfreak article uses the word "allegedly." maybe they changed it.
The real problem with solar power is not getting more watts per square inch; it's getting more watts per dollar. From what I hear, high grade silicon is prohibitively expensive. It takes more than 3 years to pay back your monetary investment. This information is probably based upon old panels though.
These new panels may produce twice the energy, but is there any chance that they cost less than twice the dollars? What is the limiting factor in solar panel costs?
I've heard that some people are working on polymer solar panels, this would seem to deal with the dependence on expensive silicon...
Why is having enforcable ratings on video games a bad thing? After all, we have movie ratings and no one is complaining.
first off, you are quite mistaken. i for one am
complaining, and i'll take this opportunity to do
so. the rating system is an arbitrary piece of
shit, that is based on ancient puritan/victorian
values. values that i for one do not subscribe to. i
believe that nudity is not filthy, and i object to
having these values foisted on the next generation
including any offspring that i might have. i think
that much important storytelling involves violence and lust. i think these stories are important to
tell children. i don't think that letting them imagine the world as all flowers and candy till they have to deal with it is a good idea. i think it's kinda twisted.
now that's not to say i don't think there are
things i would rather not have my children see. for example anything promoting racism, anything promoting feelings of shame and inadequacy over perfectly normal and healthy behavior are not appreciated by me. the christian ethic of not touching another person until marriage by a catholic priest is sort of disgusting to me. i would rather my children not be taught these ideas by the media.
now you may not exactly agree with me, or maybe you do, and that's exactly the point. no system will keep all children from seeing stuff that their parents object to. while one film might bother some parents, it might be a wonderful learning experience as far as another is concerned, and vice versa. the only way to keep a child from viewing any objectionable media in an objective kind of a way is to not let the kid view anything at all, and keep him in a little box with a lock that only the parents can open to let stuff in. i will assume that total sensory deprivation of our children is something that nobody wants.
so now that i've complained about movie ratings, let me complain about video game ratings. what will we decide is violent? is shooting down planes in jet fighter games violent? is killing aliens in invaders violent? are hunting games violent? (as a vegetarian i think so, a family that hunts might think otherwise) and if we even defined that, who says that violent games are bad? and how do i cast my vote to say that they are not? where do i have some choice in how my child shall be censored by default?
this seems to leave us with only two objective choices: censor nothing, or censor everything. i personally say we should not censor anything at all. individual parents will have to do that, and they will have to decide how to accomplish it. ultimately it comes down to how much control you have over your child, which you shall find out soon is not as much as you hoped. that is unless you are caring, explain your reasons for disliking a specific kind of media, and respect your child's choice in the matter.
to me the most horrifying factor in all this is how much parents and the government are eager to "protect the children" without even freaking pausing to ask the children themselves what they think on the matter. most young adults over the age of 13 probably have valuable oppinions on the matter, and i can bet you they don't involve being "saved." children are eager to take responsibility and to grow up. if they see you watching violent movies with mature themes, they will be eager to take up this habit. if you think there is something wrong with this then why do you do it. if you think there is nothing wrong with it, then why are you teaching them that there is?
this entire moral mode of protecting children from real life has gone on since we stopped sending children off to apprenticeships some centuries ago, and started sending them off to kindergarden. this represented a grave error on our part (i believe), and we should consider allowing children back into the real world. instead of trying to protect them from the evils of the "adult" world, let us do our job and help bring them into that world, it's where they'll be spending most of their life.
spend the money upgrading all the machines to the
latest version of windows! i think xp only costs
$500 per license, but you could probably still exaust all your funds by paying microsoft.
my friends are really right. microsoft just "get's the job done." i mean really, if we were installing
linux, we'd still have truckloads of money unspent. waste is the silent killer...
or at least, that's not all of the story...
if you followed what was happening, you'll know
that they bullied the students who owned drexel.com
out of the domain name, by threatening litigation.
one of the students who owned the name was
mysteriously kicked out! and so they
finally settled, and sold the domain name, barely
enough to pay their lawyer.
i knew the kids who owned the domain name, and
there is more to this story, that they couldn't
tell me.
it seems that drexel got angry when students who
were displeased with the school and it's administration, discussed their dissatisfaction
on the forum. i guess if someone types in
drexel.com, they don't want you seeing anything
about drexel's bad side. oh well.
i'm a student at drexel now, and finishing up my
sentence there. i'd reccommend against anybody
who is looking for colleges to even consider this
place. they're just bastards, really. go somewhere
else.
all i can think is that this will only mean tightened
security. i don't doubt that this might be cited for
any number of measures to quash our right to bear
cryptography. people will wonder who these folks
are, and how they organized. "why," they shall wonder,
"didn't the cia or fbi intercept their phone calls, emails, or whatever, and stop them before
they acted?"
what do you think? are they right? do we need to
give up our right to privacy to stop tragedies like
this? i for one fear what may come of this, ontop
of the seemingly staggering death count.
there are some really neet solutions that are more
sub and less notebook.
first, i'm kinda shakey about posting this, cause
i can only imagine it will increase the demand
and drive up price, but with that said, here i go
anyway.
i've had my eye on a sorta pda/subnotebook
from psion.
i'm particularly interested in the series 7
model. it's really light, really small, and
downright cool. and best of all, it runs for
almost nine hours of use, so you ussually go days
before recharge.
it comes with the EPIC operating system installed,
which is pretty nifty i hear. but i'm more
interested in installing
psilinux on
it. psilinux is a cool project. i'm not sure how
easy to install it is right now, but apparently with some
hacking(which is all fun right?) it's possible to
get it working with microwindows and all. nifty!
so yeah, check that out, and
don't ever say i'm not looking out for ya;)
indeed i thorougly agree. police officers have
serious problems. they power trip ALOT. and it
seems that the firey hoops you need to jump through
to become an officer limit their ranks to power hungry
maniacs.
they harass me all the time.
i get speeding tickets, skateboarding tickets,
parking tickets, and just generally harrassed for
standing still.
also my friend was attacked by an offduty cop
on the highway, the jerk just decided to stop in
the middle of the road, so my friend honks at him
this guy gets out, and begins to slash my friends
tires, my friend puts it in reverse and calls in
a report, but it's now his word against the cops
and upon calling the officers house, everyone there
pretends like he's right there and can't come to the phone.
so fuck, my friend is screwed, because the police
understand how much they can get away with and
quit often take that advantage.
i probably hate them a little
extra just irrationally on top of all that, BUT,
my point is that this post seems to be having the
effect of "let's make it like other countries
where anybody can record anybody." now, this might
be a good idea, but it might not. i just want people
to think about their own interests here. i'm only
attempting to be a little push in the opposite
direction to balance things out. slashdotters
are apparantly out in droves demanding removal of
privacy law because it could mean police privacy as well. i'm hoping to shock them into thinking
twice.
it seems the problem here isn't the law, but the fact
that the law was not well enforced in this
case.
don't let your initial reaction overwhelm you. there is another very real side to this debate. i like my privacy. alot. just because this means police officers have that same right doesn't mean it's wrong or should be revoked. maybe the specific situation should be considered to not have an expectation of privacy, but we should not let ourselves become enraged simply because the one party was an officer, or a jerk. the privacy law is good, and lacking in most states. it protects everyone equally, and that's sorta the sucky part about these rights we give ourselves, they protect everyone the same. until we can prove they are doing something wrong, we must respect their right to privacy.
screening peoples genes to see if they're likely to hurt themselves is good, it protects the people. but the thing that makes this really seedy is they decide for you whether you should
work there or not. i think they should screen you
tell you if you have bad genes, and say that you
risk it.
however, i'm sure they don't want to pay workmans
comp, so they'd rather take the decision out of
your hands. very sticky situation.
it seems pretty likely that we'll switch over to carbon. indeed i find it interesting. we've gone through the stone age, various metal ages, and now we're in the gold age.
and soon, we'll be coming into a new and great diamond age of things made of carbon. and all along, we've been made of carbon. our natural evolution figured this out eons ago. our intellectual evolution is just catching up right now.
buckminster fuller is a real world mad scientist. everybody thought he was off his rocker. he cast away the entire euclidian gemoetry in favor of a triangle based way of thinking. he built a car with three weels, circular air-deliverable houses. and fasioned the geodesic dome. after he died, it was discovered C60 naturally occurs in the shape of a geodesic dome. it just shows how damn cool he is. read more about this legend.
for billions of years, life has progressed by random, dumb luck. we've been chaotically changing, and then skimming the top. it's a slow, itterative process with no clear goal. just recently, we see on the horizon, a whole new venue of evolution. we will some day be able to create things better than ourselves. we will out-do god. when this day comes, what use will we have for ourselves? we will have created machines that are stronger, longer lasting, smarter, and even more creative than ourselves. even if we painstakingly control their creation so that they shouldn't replace us, due to some inane thoughts about individuality. the world is no longer run by individuals. corporations will see that we could progress much faster if we didn't have to support all of these "parasites." like the eyes of a newt who has been underground for 100 million years, humanity will shrivel, and eventually dissapear. but it won't take a hundred million years. in the new "neo-evolution" we will be erradicated in the blink of an eye. the act will be calculating and surgical. and frankly, it will make the world a better place. ". . . It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity." -Albert Einstein
I noted that for the new Millenium(sorta), you resolved to make a comercial quality linux only game. Are you still quite serious about this? And have you been thinking what genre game you will do? Anything juicy you wanna say? Just between you and me?;)
Slashdot Mirror
the thing that makes this voting system great is the public list of all the votes. most attacks are hard against this.
This means one of two things. You might be giving up secret ballots - which keeps getting suggested but is still a bad idea that a sane population won't accept. The other possibility is that you have some complex cryptographic verification protocol that allows you to prove to yourself that your vote was properly counted but not prove to anyone else what your vote was. The latter schemes are neat, but no-one will actually uses them because they're too complicated.
so ok, the system described in these sources is more the latter. It does preserve secrecy. i encrypt my vote, then the election authority re-encrypts my vote. some more stuff is added and we both sign it. We prove that this is what we've done with ZK-proof. Now on the public forum there is my name next to this encrypted vote. i have a copy of this, so i can look on the bulletin board to see that it's there. Furthermore, while I was convinced (or the devices are convinced) that my vote corresponds to this encrypted vote, It is impossible to convince a coercer of these things. i can verify that it's my vote, but i can't decrypt it to prove to the coercer that i voted for anybody in particular.
finally there are many methods to provably decrypt and shuffle this public bulletin, or with homomorphic voting, to just add up and then decrypt these votes.
now i won't argue that these systems are easily understood by your average person, but i think your average person understands the weaknesses of the current system. which would you prefer? you have a system that anybody can see is crap, on the one hand, and a system that cryptographers can see is good, on the other. by the way, i don't include myself in this group of people who understand this stuff. i have only a vague understanding of crypto-voting, but i can see the flow of things. i think there will be a large "intellectual middle class" that can't verify all the finest details of the crypto-voting, but can at least understand it grossly. we shouldn't pretend that it'll be all black magic to everyone but the 10 leaders in the field. maybe those 10 are the only ones who could think it up, but there are tens of thousands who will understand it completely, and there are tens of millions who will basically get it.
now with the weaknesses of paper voting, and the GLARING weaknesses of most electronic voting, we've got to get the word out. i think it's the most democratic option we've got. the entire election can be verified at the end (check the election authority's ZK proof, check the public board) by anybody, with publicly posted information. this power of the public to verify the election is something we haven't even been close to having since we gave up public voting in the 19th century. now with cryptography we could restore the power of auditing to the people without giving up secrecy, and without enabling coercion.
i think we have a duty to begin testing this system, even though the system is complicated and difficult to explain. because really, most people have no idea how elections are run today! any system that's any good at all will not be able to be explained in a 10 second sound bite, and that is the duration of the public's patience for this stuff anyway. here at least those who put in the energy can conclude that the system is impossible (or nearly impossible) to rig.
so i think i've addressed point 1. somewhat. i think that secrecy is preserved, technical transparency is not as good as you think it is now, nor as bad as you imagine under crypto-voting.
as for point 2: yes there are challenges both political and practical in implementing and adopting this system, but they are surmountable, and that is where we should be spending our effort. i'm not privy to the details, but mr. weiss mentions that votehere has come at least near
this thread is now fairly old, but i'll respond anyhow.
i feel like these negative comments i get are in response to some really crappy protocol that i'm not talking about. please actually see what it is that i'm talking about before you poo-poo it.
the thing that makes this voting system great is the public list of all the votes. most attacks are hard against this.
now i propose that each voter needs some sort of 'voting device' that they buy at the store. these devices must be available from multiple vendors, and all information needed to make one from scratch must be available. (the protocol must be open)
if each person has something like this, then they do not need to trust an expert. i will give it my vote, and it will give me an encryption of that vote, as well as a zero-knowledge proof that it is well formed.
the devices would be easily tested in toy 1-vote elections (experts might do these tests). surely no brand of voting-device that failed these tests with any significant regularity would see use.
finally, there is no need to have an expert at every precinct.
each person gets a receipt of their vote. each person can check that their vote is on the public forum.
the election authority provides a proof that the publicly listed encrypted votes have been shuffled, decrypted, and added correctly.
you only need experts to verify 2 things here:
now let me close by saying that i agree. my mom having to depend on me or some expert to verify that the election was done right, it doesn't ring true. everyone should be able to personally verify that the vote was done right. the problem is this: while you complain alot, you present no way to make this perfectly trustworthy process possible. here's why: it's REALLY FUCKING HARD! paper ballots systems have huge security problems. a few thousand observers running around the country trying to make sure that nothing funny is happening in any of the multitude of precincts, nor their cars, nor during the counting, nor during the voting, nor anywhere else that we haven't thought of, well it simply doesn't work. look at florida. better yet, read section 9 of the pdf i linked for many examples of the failure of paper voting.
rather than pointing out the minutia that keep cryptovoting from being a perfect graceful flower of divine providence, please help me in recognizing that it is better than anything we have, and in fixing its warts.
P.S. homomorphic voting is actually pretty graceful and floral. check the recommendation in section 7.3 of that pdf i link.
i've mentioned cryptographic voting here before, there seem to be a lot of articles about electronic voting in general these past few months.
i'd like to start by saying that i reject this argument that cryptographic voting should be passed over because not everyone can understand the protocols well enough. My mom might not understand it, but she trusts me, and I understand it, and that should be enough. Maybe not, but maybe trusting me, and my cousin, and all of the newspapers, and all of the political parties, and anybody else, anywhere in the world who feels like it and knows enough, maybe that is enough.
You see, there will by many independent verifiers with cryptovoting, and even if I don't understand exactly how to verify it, it is extremely unlikely that every single independent verifier is lying to me.
furthermore, even if you don't understand the cryptography, you can download "steve's e-vote verifier 2.0." There would be many independently implemented, and competing softwares, and you could pick among them and run it on the published vote proof. i admit that this is a less visceral verification than most people would like, but it is another method that less crypto-savvy voters have to verify the vote. and again, any newspaper or magazine could verify the vote for themselves and publish their approval or disapproval.
beyond verifying that the vote was added correctly, which involves very complicated cryptography. there is the matter of assuring that my
vote is cast properly. With cryptovoting there would be a public list of all the people who voted, and all of their (encrypted) votes. i personally encrypt my vote (i must provide a proof that it is properly formatted) and can compare my paper copy of my encrypted vote to the publicly posted vote which is next to my name.
now as far as the paper hand count being auditable by anyone, i call bs. you must be the privileged few who have the political power to do the recount. there is limited access, which makes it much more opaque. with cryptographic voting, the only thing between you and personal verification is the study of math and cryptography. that may be a high hurdle for grandpa, but it's much more democratic than a requirement of privilege.
now the difficulty in explaining cryptovoting does make it hard to sell to people. but that is why we who understand these things should try to get the word out to our less technical friends and family. cryptovoting, done right, would give us unprecedented confidence in our election results.
please read more about cryptovoting, and if you agree with me, get the word out. check out this pdf for a technical description, and this video for another nice one. The video is the lighter of the two. These sources pretty much sum up the total of my knowledge on this stuff. Be warned: a little number theory is required to understand what they're talking about half the time. with that said, even the layman should find much of the video interesting.
interesting. can these demos only be run in windows? i ran some of the ones from 256b.com in dosbox on linux, but they run very slow. what api are they using to effect these visuals? or are they just trying to write directly to a vesa compliant device?
cryptographic voting protocols have gotten much better. All that's left to do is write a nice specification, and implement it. this is hard, but my guess is that it'll be easier than the crypography was.
it's sad, but i i think that diebold (and all other current electronic voting machines) may have soured the public opinion of electronic voting so badly that it will be impossible to convince people that cryptographic voting is any good, and cryptovoting was already hard to sell because it's tough to explain how it works.
we need to get the word out on cryptovoting though. it could raise the level of control people have over elections to an unprecedented height. let your less geeky friends know that you think it's good.
that is, if you DO think it's good. may i offer this pdf as a good place to start. also this video is very nice, and seemingly a little more up to date.
Cryptographic voting is pretty strong now. We should employ it. I read this pdf a couple of days ago and the system that is recommended in section 7.3 seems practicable with current technology and protocols.
The paper is pretty technical (which is good), but sections 8 and 9 are good reading for anybody(even the impatient person) who wants to see existing voting technology get the smackdown.
As far as I know there is not any strong evidence that CRIA has done anything yet. The server is down, true, but I heard it's just a hard drive failure. Some demonoid people were complaining about the bad journalism reporting that the CRIA shut down demonoid, without anybody from demonoid saying this. Who is the source on this? Some nu.nl article? How do they know anything? Here is an IRC log where demonoid staff give the torrentfreak admin a hard time for reprinting the nu.nl story about the CRIA without having confirmed it in any way. To be fair, at this point in time, the torrentfreak article uses the word "allegedly." maybe they changed it.
The real problem with solar power is not getting more watts per square inch; it's getting more watts per dollar. From what I hear, high grade silicon is prohibitively expensive. It takes more than 3 years to pay back your monetary investment. This information is probably based upon old panels though.
These new panels may produce twice the energy, but is there any chance that they cost less than twice the dollars? What is the limiting factor in solar panel costs?
I've heard that some people are working on polymer solar panels, this would seem to deal with the dependence on expensive silicon...
first off, you are quite mistaken. i for one am complaining, and i'll take this opportunity to do so. the rating system is an arbitrary piece of shit, that is based on ancient puritan/victorian values. values that i for one do not subscribe to. i believe that nudity is not filthy, and i object to having these values foisted on the next generation including any offspring that i might have. i think that much important storytelling involves violence and lust. i think these stories are important to tell children. i don't think that letting them imagine the world as all flowers and candy till they have to deal with it is a good idea. i think it's kinda twisted.
now that's not to say i don't think there are things i would rather not have my children see. for example anything promoting racism, anything promoting feelings of shame and inadequacy over perfectly normal and healthy behavior are not appreciated by me. the christian ethic of not touching another person until marriage by a catholic priest is sort of disgusting to me. i would rather my children not be taught these ideas by the media.
now you may not exactly agree with me, or maybe you do, and that's exactly the point. no system will keep all children from seeing stuff that their parents object to. while one film might bother some parents, it might be a wonderful learning experience as far as another is concerned, and vice versa. the only way to keep a child from viewing any objectionable media in an objective kind of a way is to not let the kid view anything at all, and keep him in a little box with a lock that only the parents can open to let stuff in. i will assume that total sensory deprivation of our children is something that nobody wants.
so now that i've complained about movie ratings, let me complain about video game ratings. what will we decide is violent? is shooting down planes in jet fighter games violent? is killing aliens in invaders violent? are hunting games violent? (as a vegetarian i think so, a family that hunts might think otherwise) and if we even defined that, who says that violent games are bad? and how do i cast my vote to say that they are not? where do i have some choice in how my child shall be censored by default?
this seems to leave us with only two objective choices: censor nothing, or censor everything. i personally say we should not censor anything at all. individual parents will have to do that, and they will have to decide how to accomplish it. ultimately it comes down to how much control you have over your child, which you shall find out soon is not as much as you hoped. that is unless you are caring, explain your reasons for disliking a specific kind of media, and respect your child's choice in the matter.
to me the most horrifying factor in all this is how much parents and the government are eager to "protect the children" without even freaking pausing to ask the children themselves what they think on the matter. most young adults over the age of 13 probably have valuable oppinions on the matter, and i can bet you they don't involve being "saved." children are eager to take responsibility and to grow up. if they see you watching violent movies with mature themes, they will be eager to take up this habit. if you think there is something wrong with this then why do you do it. if you think there is nothing wrong with it, then why are you teaching them that there is?
this entire moral mode of protecting children from real life has gone on since we stopped sending children off to apprenticeships some centuries ago, and started sending them off to kindergarden. this represented a grave error on our part (i believe), and we should consider allowing children back into the real world. instead of trying to protect them from the evils of the "adult" world, let us do our job and help bring them into that world, it's where they'll be spending most of their life.
spend the money upgrading all the machines to the latest version of windows! i think xp only costs $500 per license, but you could probably still exaust all your funds by paying microsoft.
my friends are really right. microsoft just "get's the job done." i mean really, if we were installing linux, we'd still have truckloads of money unspent. waste is the silent killer...
or at least, that's not all of the story... if you followed what was happening, you'll know that they bullied the students who owned drexel.com out of the domain name, by threatening litigation.
one of the students who owned the name was mysteriously kicked out ! and so they finally settled, and sold the domain name, barely enough to pay their lawyer.
i knew the kids who owned the domain name, and there is more to this story, that they couldn't tell me.
it seems that drexel got angry when students who were displeased with the school and it's administration, discussed their dissatisfaction on the forum. i guess if someone types in drexel.com, they don't want you seeing anything about drexel's bad side. oh well.
i'm a student at drexel now, and finishing up my sentence there. i'd reccommend against anybody who is looking for colleges to even consider this place. they're just bastards, really. go somewhere else.
let the karma roll in!
all i can think is that this will only mean tightened security. i don't doubt that this might be cited for any number of measures to quash our right to bear cryptography. people will wonder who these folks are, and how they organized. "why," they shall wonder, "didn't the cia or fbi intercept their phone calls, emails, or whatever, and stop them before they acted?"
what do you think? are they right? do we need to give up our right to privacy to stop tragedies like this? i for one fear what may come of this, ontop of the seemingly staggering death count.
there are some really neet solutions that are more sub and less notebook.
first, i'm kinda shakey about posting this, cause i can only imagine it will increase the demand and drive up price, but with that said, here i go anyway.
i've had my eye on a sorta pda/subnotebook from psion. i'm particularly interested in the series 7 model. it's really light, really small, and downright cool. and best of all, it runs for almost nine hours of use, so you ussually go days before recharge.
it comes with the EPIC operating system installed, which is pretty nifty i hear. but i'm more interested in installing psilinux on it. psilinux is a cool project. i'm not sure how easy to install it is right now, but apparently with some hacking(which is all fun right?) it's possible to get it working with microwindows and all. nifty!
so yeah, check that out, and don't ever say i'm not looking out for ya ;)
indeed i thorougly agree. police officers have serious problems. they power trip ALOT. and it seems that the firey hoops you need to jump through to become an officer limit their ranks to power hungry maniacs. they harass me all the time. i get speeding tickets, skateboarding tickets, parking tickets, and just generally harrassed for standing still.
also my friend was attacked by an offduty cop on the highway, the jerk just decided to stop in the middle of the road, so my friend honks at him this guy gets out, and begins to slash my friends tires, my friend puts it in reverse and calls in a report, but it's now his word against the cops and upon calling the officers house, everyone there pretends like he's right there and can't come to the phone. so fuck, my friend is screwed, because the police understand how much they can get away with and quit often take that advantage.
i probably hate them a little extra just irrationally on top of all that, BUT, my point is that this post seems to be having the effect of "let's make it like other countries where anybody can record anybody." now, this might be a good idea, but it might not. i just want people to think about their own interests here. i'm only attempting to be a little push in the opposite direction to balance things out. slashdotters are apparantly out in droves demanding removal of privacy law because it could mean police privacy as well. i'm hoping to shock them into thinking twice.
it seems the problem here isn't the law, but the fact that the law was not well enforced in this case.
don't let your initial reaction overwhelm you. there is another very real side to this debate. i like my privacy. alot. just because this means police officers have that same right doesn't mean it's wrong or should be revoked. maybe the specific situation should be considered to not have an expectation of privacy, but we should not let ourselves become enraged simply because the one party was an officer, or a jerk. the privacy law is good, and lacking in most states. it protects everyone equally, and that's sorta the sucky part about these rights we give ourselves, they protect everyone the same. until we can prove they are doing something wrong, we must respect their right to privacy.
screening peoples genes to see if they're likely to hurt themselves is good, it protects the people. but the thing that makes this really seedy is they decide for you whether you should work there or not. i think they should screen you tell you if you have bad genes, and say that you risk it. however, i'm sure they don't want to pay workmans comp, so they'd rather take the decision out of your hands. very sticky situation.
has the gimp topic icon always moved it's eyes like that? or was the icon changed deliberately to scare the shit out of me for the month of october?
it seems pretty likely that we'll switch over to carbon. indeed i find it interesting. we've gone through the stone age, various metal ages, and now we're in the gold age. and soon, we'll be coming into a new and great diamond age of things made of carbon. and all along, we've been made of carbon. our natural evolution figured this out eons ago. our intellectual evolution is just catching up right now.
buckminster fuller is a real world mad scientist. everybody thought he was off his rocker. he cast away the entire euclidian gemoetry in favor of a triangle based way of thinking. he built a car with three weels, circular air-deliverable houses. and fasioned the geodesic dome. after he died, it was discovered C60 naturally occurs in the shape of a geodesic dome. it just shows how damn cool he is. read more about this legend.
for billions of years, life has progressed by random, dumb luck. we've been chaotically changing, and then skimming the top. it's a slow, itterative process with no clear goal. just recently, we see on the horizon, a whole new venue of evolution. we will some day be able to create things better than ourselves. we will out-do god. when this day comes, what use will we have for ourselves? we will have created machines that are stronger, longer lasting, smarter, and even more creative than ourselves. even if we painstakingly control their creation so that they shouldn't replace us, due to some inane thoughts about individuality. the world is no longer run by individuals. corporations will see that we could progress much faster if we didn't have to support all of these "parasites." like the eyes of a newt who has been underground for 100 million years, humanity will shrivel, and eventually dissapear. but it won't take a hundred million years. in the new "neo-evolution" we will be erradicated in the blink of an eye. the act will be calculating and surgical. and frankly, it will make the world a better place. ". . . It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity." -Albert Einstein
I noted that for the new Millenium(sorta), you resolved to make a comercial quality linux only game. Are you still quite serious about this? And have you been thinking what genre game you will do? Anything juicy you wanna say? Just between you and me? ;)
security through obscurity sucks. those napster lamos should just not bite boners.