RTFP/RTFM. You can't do vote-buying with the vote-here scheme, because the receipt doesn't say who you voted for. The receipt just shows a cryptographic hash of your vote that you can use to confirm that the vote didn't change. You can verify that the hash corresponds to the vote you intend in the voting booth, but once you leave the poll, there's no information left to prove who you voted for. The ballot remains anonymous, and your vote is secret.
The vote-buying schemes you describe are *exactly* what VoteHere's system is designed to avoid.
There are all sorts of attacks that Molly Pollwatcher will never catch. You also have to make sure that the ballot doesn't get changed/lost after submission. VoteHere provides exactly that capability. If your vote isn't present or is different in the counting set after the polls close, you can prove it. Paper doesn't offer that capability, because it would violate anonymity. Thanks to cryptographic techniques, we can ensure integrity without breaking the secrecy of your vote. Since any system that requires voters to shuffle ElGamal pairs by hand is obviously overcomplicated, a computer is the only way we can accomplish this.
The key is *authoritative* paper receipts. If, as most of these plans assume, the paper ballot is trusted over the electronic ballot in case anything is ever called into question, then all you have to do to force fallback to the paper count is demand a recount. That brings us right back to centuries-old vote fraud schemes we've been suffering from for ages, and also obviates the very expensive and complicated computer equipment.
If you want to see a really clever electronic voting system, check out VoteHere. They use paper receipts that basically records a hash of your vote, so your receipt cannot prove to anyone who was not looking over your shoulder when you cast the ballot what that vote was, but still allows you to prove that your vote has/has not been changed after the polls close. As VoteHere points out, authoritative paper receipts really just turn the machine into a very expensive pencil, when they offer the potential to do so much more.
By the way, I have no ties to VoteHere, I've just been studying electronic voting a lot lately.
Of course, this system has weaknesses, as will any system which enforces both authenticity and anonymity, but even if it cannot be protected against all attacks, it at least lets you know when an attack is happening, which is a huge step up from most paper and even electronic systems.
In my UN-professional opinion, this sounds like an attempt to coerce breach of loyalty. That is, if you're employed by the ISP, you are bound to serve its interests, such as honoring the privacy of users except when established procedures for revealing information are being followed. This puts the ISPs in a rather difficult position, because their only hope for maintaining authority over their employees and control of their customer's private data is to promise to defend any employee sued for following company policy, which can be quite expensive, which certainly plays into the hands of the RIAA and their dump trucks full of $100 bills.
Any lawyers in the crowd know if the ISPs have grounds to pre-emptively sue the RIAA over this threat intended to coerce their employees to betray them?
A good installer for a vanilla desktop user would take advantage of all the hardware on their system. It should detect your sound card, and then play a sound that says "hey, we found your sound card!" and it should let you use your USB mouse, show all this stuff on your display in such a fashion that acknowledges the existence of the video card, etc.
Basically, it should be more like Knoppix.
Now, I wouldn't want to lock the user, who may not be a vanilla desktop user and may not even have a mouse or video card on the machine, into this setup, but it sure would be nice to have the option, wouldn't it?
Knoppix is wonderful and all, but it leaves behind some artifacts of the live CD setup that can make package upgrades (which users ought to be able to do graphically, and with little pain) very painful. If we could get stuff like this in the base Debian distribution, we'd be a lot closer to Debian being sufficiently user-friendly that we could hand a disc to grandma without fear.
For some reason, every time I do an installation of Debian, I end up with a *different* good, qt-based CD burning tool, as well as a half-dozen other crappy ones. Not sure why it's always a qt-based one. The one on the current desktop is cdbakeoven, which looks to me like any Easy CD Creator or Nero user ought to be able to figure it out. The downside of all this is that every time I do a linux install, I have to *find* the one good CD burning tool among the masses of crappy ones.
Quiet down people! This is not a particularly astonishing thing to have in such a contract. Boies's firm would frankly be nuts to take a case of this magnitude without some guarantee that if they are successful, but there is no judgement, that they will still get a payoff. This doesn't mean that the firm is motivated to encourage SCO getting bought out, since in fact that could quite possibly hurt them. What this really means is that the firm knows, like the rest of us, that SCO would jump at any buyout offer, and they're making sure they don't get completely screwed out of their contingency fee if it happens.
Don't take this as a sign that SCO has lots of friends in low places. Really all this means is that people who ought to know aren't confident that they'll be around much longer.
From an information theory perspective, if you make a copy of a perfectly compressed 100 MB file, the amount of information you have created is just a few bytes, the copy command and the paths of the files, and even then there's a lot of redundancy. I have a large portion of my 60 GB hard drive filled with oggs, but you could just as well describe them all by listing all the albums I've ripped. That would just take a couple k, and would also be highly redundant. I've probably created well over 100 GB of data this year, but I wouldn't say that much of it was new information.
The self-certifying filesystem or the cooperative filesystem might do what you want, though I believe they only run on unix platforms. The code is considered to be in the alpha stage, but apparently the maintainers have been using it for a while without losing files. On some platforms SFS (on which CFS is based) has the nasty habit of deadlocking the kernel from time to time. You might want to read their documentation, since this might not be a problem for what you're running on.
I was under the impression that kernel.org has more bandwidth than God. I suppose this might be relevant when 2.6.0-release comes out, but are that many people really running the test kernel of the day?
For those who are considering mirroring, my lawyer warns that angering large, litigious corporations is not generally a bright move, even if they don't have a leg to stand on in court.
Oh no, the static discharge was between my finger (connected to my body, which was grounded) and the DIMM, which had been in contact with his body as he walked across the carpet. It was quite loud, and at least a half centimeter long. I don't have my E&M book handy, but I'm sure that's orders of magnitude higher than the minimum potentially damaging voltage. It was pretty cheap RAM, so I guess we just got lucky.
I am reminded of an old adage, paraphrased here because I cannot find the exact text. "When headed to sea, take 1 compass or 3, but never 2."
To make matters worse, having a card printed out allows for chain voting. This is a scheme in which one voter sneaks their card out of the polling place, shows it to someone who pays them for their vote, and hands it to the next person who drops it in after they're done voting, and brings their card to get paid, and so it goes and so it goes. The first person can sneak it out rather trivially, because even if they're required to dump a card in a box, they can dump in a dummy card. No one can check their card for anonymity reasons. If you have some method of "holding" a vote until a card with some identifier is dropped in (and cancelling it if it's not soon, to avoid chain voting) then someone who screws up will have their vote cancelled and no way of getting to try again, unless those holds are associated with identity, in which case anonymity is violated. Letting voters screw up has already been established to be an unfair disenfranchisement.
Brazil uses electronic voting machines that cost a small fraction of what Diebold is selling, display photos of the candidates (critical for the illiterate), have batteries that can last them all day(for elections deep in the amazon where poewr is not), and were developed by two of their top research institutions in an open fashion. They used paper receipts at first, but after some chain voting scams were uncovered, they did away with them, deciding that the machines were trustworthy enough and reliable enough that it was a gain overall.
Did I mention that these machines cost a small fraction of the Diebold machines?
You're right, this will keep them going for a while. What I meant (and did a bad job explaining) was that it's still not enough for them to really change their business model. They're fucked in the long run, but in the short run they'll try to make it someone else's problem.
This isn't enough money to pull them out of their revenue doldrums. It's just enough money to make them a huge pain in the ass. If it were $500 million we'd probably have *less* to worry about, because they might be able to actually pursue product-based revenue streams.
Slashdot Mirror
RTFP/RTFM. You can't do vote-buying with the vote-here scheme, because the receipt doesn't say who you voted for. The receipt just shows a cryptographic hash of your vote that you can use to confirm that the vote didn't change. You can verify that the hash corresponds to the vote you intend in the voting booth, but once you leave the poll, there's no information left to prove who you voted for. The ballot remains anonymous, and your vote is secret.
The vote-buying schemes you describe are *exactly* what VoteHere's system is designed to avoid.
There are all sorts of attacks that Molly Pollwatcher will never catch. You also have to make sure that the ballot doesn't get changed/lost after submission. VoteHere provides exactly that capability. If your vote isn't present or is different in the counting set after the polls close, you can prove it. Paper doesn't offer that capability, because it would violate anonymity. Thanks to cryptographic techniques, we can ensure integrity without breaking the secrecy of your vote. Since any system that requires voters to shuffle ElGamal pairs by hand is obviously overcomplicated, a computer is the only way we can accomplish this.
The key is *authoritative* paper receipts. If, as most of these plans assume, the paper ballot is trusted over the electronic ballot in case anything is ever called into question, then all you have to do to force fallback to the paper count is demand a recount. That brings us right back to centuries-old vote fraud schemes we've been suffering from for ages, and also obviates the very expensive and complicated computer equipment.
If you want to see a really clever electronic voting system, check out VoteHere. They use paper receipts that basically records a hash of your vote, so your receipt cannot prove to anyone who was not looking over your shoulder when you cast the ballot what that vote was, but still allows you to prove that your vote has/has not been changed after the polls close. As VoteHere points out, authoritative paper receipts really just turn the machine into a very expensive pencil, when they offer the potential to do so much more.
By the way, I have no ties to VoteHere, I've just been studying electronic voting a lot lately.
For more info, see http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
Of course, this system has weaknesses, as will any system which enforces both authenticity and anonymity, but even if it cannot be protected against all attacks, it at least lets you know when an attack is happening, which is a huge step up from most paper and even electronic systems.
We should try taking down the net for a few days, and see if we get a baby boom 9 months later. I bet we would.
In my UN-professional opinion, this sounds like an attempt to coerce breach of loyalty. That is, if you're employed by the ISP, you are bound to serve its interests, such as honoring the privacy of users except when established procedures for revealing information are being followed. This puts the ISPs in a rather difficult position, because their only hope for maintaining authority over their employees and control of their customer's private data is to promise to defend any employee sued for following company policy, which can be quite expensive, which certainly plays into the hands of the RIAA and their dump trucks full of $100 bills.
Any lawyers in the crowd know if the ISPs have grounds to pre-emptively sue the RIAA over this threat intended to coerce their employees to betray them?
Have you ever tried an apt-get dist-upgrade on knoppix? It's not pleasant.
That's why it would be quite pleasant if we had the option to do both. Think Redhat. Think Knoppix. Now try thinking that and Debian at the same time.
A good installer for a vanilla desktop user would take advantage of all the hardware on their system. It should detect your sound card, and then play a sound that says "hey, we found your sound card!" and it should let you use your USB mouse, show all this stuff on your display in such a fashion that acknowledges the existence of the video card, etc.
Basically, it should be more like Knoppix.
Now, I wouldn't want to lock the user, who may not be a vanilla desktop user and may not even have a mouse or video card on the machine, into this setup, but it sure would be nice to have the option, wouldn't it?
Knoppix is wonderful and all, but it leaves behind some artifacts of the live CD setup that can make package upgrades (which users ought to be able to do graphically, and with little pain) very painful. If we could get stuff like this in the base Debian distribution, we'd be a lot closer to Debian being sufficiently user-friendly that we could hand a disc to grandma without fear.
*prepares for the "get redhat" flames*
For some reason, every time I do an installation of Debian, I end up with a *different* good, qt-based CD burning tool, as well as a half-dozen other crappy ones. Not sure why it's always a qt-based one. The one on the current desktop is cdbakeoven, which looks to me like any Easy CD Creator or Nero user ought to be able to figure it out. The downside of all this is that every time I do a linux install, I have to *find* the one good CD burning tool among the masses of crappy ones.
You can fit 160 mp3s onto a single CD. Think about that...
Quiet down people! This is not a particularly astonishing thing to have in such a contract. Boies's firm would frankly be nuts to take a case of this magnitude without some guarantee that if they are successful, but there is no judgement, that they will still get a payoff. This doesn't mean that the firm is motivated to encourage SCO getting bought out, since in fact that could quite possibly hurt them. What this really means is that the firm knows, like the rest of us, that SCO would jump at any buyout offer, and they're making sure they don't get completely screwed out of their contingency fee if it happens.
Don't take this as a sign that SCO has lots of friends in low places. Really all this means is that people who ought to know aren't confident that they'll be around much longer.
They're getting DDoSed, and you're *slashdotting* them? I'm sure that will solve the problem.
From an information theory perspective, if you make a copy of a perfectly compressed 100 MB file, the amount of information you have created is just a few bytes, the copy command and the paths of the files, and even then there's a lot of redundancy. I have a large portion of my 60 GB hard drive filled with oggs, but you could just as well describe them all by listing all the albums I've ripped. That would just take a couple k, and would also be highly redundant. I've probably created well over 100 GB of data this year, but I wouldn't say that much of it was new information.
"...we had to approximate the Travelling Salesman Problem"
*returns to writing thesis proposal on approximating TSP variant*
The self-certifying filesystem or the cooperative filesystem might do what you want, though I believe they only run on unix platforms. The code is considered to be in the alpha stage, but apparently the maintainers have been using it for a while without losing files. On some platforms SFS (on which CFS is based) has the nasty habit of deadlocking the kernel from time to time. You might want to read their documentation, since this might not be a problem for what you're running on.
SFS
CFS
I was under the impression that kernel.org has more bandwidth than God. I suppose this might be relevant when 2.6.0-release comes out, but are that many people really running the test kernel of the day?
http://www.guanotronic.com/~snook/lists.tar.bz2
http://www.guanotronic.com/~snook/lists.tgz
For those who are considering mirroring, my lawyer warns that angering large, litigious corporations is not generally a bright move, even if they don't have a leg to stand on in court.
Oh no, the static discharge was between my finger (connected to my body, which was grounded) and the DIMM, which had been in contact with his body as he walked across the carpet. It was quite loud, and at least a half centimeter long. I don't have my E&M book handy, but I'm sure that's orders of magnitude higher than the minimum potentially damaging voltage. It was pretty cheap RAM, so I guess we just got lucky.
"Dad, can you bring me the RAM?"
*Dad walks across heavily carpeted room.*
*Dad holds out the DIMM. I reach and grab it.*
ZAP!!!
*shrug*
The system works just fine.
Calling spamming a profession is like calling a hooker in Vegas a marriage.
I am reminded of an old adage, paraphrased here because I cannot find the exact text. "When headed to sea, take 1 compass or 3, but never 2."
To make matters worse, having a card printed out allows for chain voting. This is a scheme in which one voter sneaks their card out of the polling place, shows it to someone who pays them for their vote, and hands it to the next person who drops it in after they're done voting, and brings their card to get paid, and so it goes and so it goes. The first person can sneak it out rather trivially, because even if they're required to dump a card in a box, they can dump in a dummy card. No one can check their card for anonymity reasons. If you have some method of "holding" a vote until a card with some identifier is dropped in (and cancelling it if it's not soon, to avoid chain voting) then someone who screws up will have their vote cancelled and no way of getting to try again, unless those holds are associated with identity, in which case anonymity is violated. Letting voters screw up has already been established to be an unfair disenfranchisement.
Brazil uses electronic voting machines that cost a small fraction of what Diebold is selling, display photos of the candidates (critical for the illiterate), have batteries that can last them all day(for elections deep in the amazon where poewr is not), and were developed by two of their top research institutions in an open fashion. They used paper receipts at first, but after some chain voting scams were uncovered, they did away with them, deciding that the machines were trustworthy enough and reliable enough that it was a gain overall.
Did I mention that these machines cost a small fraction of the Diebold machines?
You're right, this will keep them going for a while. What I meant (and did a bad job explaining) was that it's still not enough for them to really change their business model. They're fucked in the long run, but in the short run they'll try to make it someone else's problem.
This isn't enough money to pull them out of their revenue doldrums. It's just enough money to make them a huge pain in the ass. If it were $500 million we'd probably have *less* to worry about, because they might be able to actually pursue product-based revenue streams.
It was UNC. Check the bottom of this page:
1 -q2/0001.html
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/novell/200