At least in a paper voting world, there needs to be some semblance of a paper trail record to be available for recounting.
While such systems can be manipulated, it takes quite a lot of people in the loop to do so. Voter early, vote often; run a steel rod through any Republican ballots in Democratic areas...
The move to scannable ballots using sharpie markers is a bit better but physical security of those are questionable as they allow thermal printouts and often have the covers open at the polling places.
Right now, if I want to steal an election, I probably have to bury my opponent in the places that I control the entire polling apparatus with my political party hacks. It looks crude and messy to anyone who watches.
Now if we have all the local precincts reporting frequently into a central computer system with two way back door communications; we can easily determine the number of manufactured ballots needed and allocate them over a greater number of precincts without drawing any attention at all.
An example of this is a weighted average cost bid, I have personal experience with this. If we know that there are two items on the list; one says it will buy a million of an item and the other says it will buy 3 of the item but the quantities are reversed. I can make my evaluated bid much lower and rape the buyer by biddin no cost for the first item and $10,000 for the second item (assuming both are worth $1000); however the bid will look really, really abnormal compared to the other bidders and they are going to smell a rat even if they don't know the real quantities to be bought.
However, were I to just shade the bid a bit by lowering the cost on one and raising on the other I could win the bid, have higher margins and no one be any the wiser. OK, the example of a million vs 3 is too extreme but so is the ballot count for Democrats in these key urban areas coming in higher than the total number of living and dead there.
If the election comes in as the controlling power wishes, there is no need to do anything. If it is off track, they can certainly round up people on buses to vote but they can also create some new ballots that will be totally untraceable.
All electronic balloting is not to be trusted.
Computers do many wonderful things, counting elections is not one of them.
The only purpose to use completely electronic voting whether by voting machine or web services, is to make it easier to steal elections without the messy paper trail of paper ballots or the need to double punch those unwanted Republican ballots.
Of course there is no security. The idea is to know ahead of time at the central computers how many votes are needed so they can be added in quietly with smoothed data and not the mass stuffed ballot boxes of so many past stolen elections.
I encourage people to write to their website in protest. This will only make it more expensive to travel and not add any security at all. Mineta won't allo the pilots, mostly former military, to have real guns.
Personally I would pass out Glocks at the door to anyone willing to take one. Just like folks are asked aboout sitting in the emergency exits.
An armed air society is a polite one.
Here are my comments to then:
I am writing in response to an AP article tha NWA wishes to use biometrics on passengers.
As an IT professional and a privacy advocate, I am strongly opposed to plans to implement human biometrices for passenger check ins.
In fact if NWA goes ahead with its plans to use biometrics I will do anything and everything possible to not patronize NWA personally or through any of the companies that I control or participate in.
This is a patently silly idea. It offeres no security advantage whatsoever. Why doesn't NWA work on securing the 802.11b wireless networks in use to ensure that passenger bags match the passenger manifests? Such networks are known to be susceptible to hacking and can be an entry point into the system to tamper with passenger and baggage records.
There is no need for additional id requirements over and above the current requirements for a government issued photo id.
If the biometrics kept on the card, then the cards themselves are subject to tamper. If the biometrics are kept online then we have a whole new world of private company privacy invasion. Moreover it would still be possible to tamper with and evade such a system.
Even proposed facial recognition systems applied to a large population will yield a substantial amount of false positives.
Since these terrorists are adept at manipulating systems and people, it is unlikely that the next group will be in anyones database.
How many grey haired grannies and grandpas are we willing to subject to close body searches in the name of political correctness?
In the end, biometrices add zero security at great cost to personal privacy and muliple millions in excessive costs passed on to consumers.
Anyone believing in biometrics would do well to refer to the writings of Douglas Adams who posited that once we had all been poked and prodded enough for DNA samples and the like we would put all that information into a universal identity card which of course makes it incredibly easy to steal someone else's identity.
Snce you guys want to be Big Brother you can look up my Frequent Flyer number yourself.
David Sussman dsussman@earthlink.net
# Northwest Wants Eye-Scan Check-Ins Airline Seeks Approval For Test
1024869783
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Print This Story (AP) (EAGAN, Minn.) Jun 20, 2002 1:11 pm US/Central Northwest Airlines wants to test a check-in system that uses cards with encrypted eye scans.
Northwest and other major carriers plan to ask the Transportation Security Administration next month for permission to test the system.
A company official said Northwest hopes that the system will give its frequent flyers a faster way to get through security.
If it is approved, Northwest will use its employees to start the pilot program by this fall at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
If the pilot program succeeds, Northwest would expand it to customers and implement it at other hubs in Detroit and Memphis, then elsewhere.
Privacy advocates have raised warnings about identity card systems, saying that the government would need to safeguard personal data and maintaining that existing technologies are not foolproof.
I downloaded the Caldera IPO filing on Edgar to try to see how to participate in the Directed Share Program. I found that you need to open an account with Wit Capital (Their site is jsp:) )
The specific text from the filing is on page 69 and 70 of the document, on my printed copy it was pages 74 and 75 of 393...
They say half of the 10% Directed Share Program goes to company employees and insiders and the other half to the Linux community via a program at Wit Capital. Apart from needing to fund a $2,000 account at Wit Capital, there is no more information about the program. I have an email in to ask of this at Wit.
Anyone have more details?
Here goes:
Directed Share Program. At our request, the underwriters have reserved for sale, at the initial public offering price, up to ten percent of the shares of common stock offered in this offering under a directed share program. We currently expect that approximately half of these shares will be offered to directors, officers, employees, business associates, and related persons of Caldera Systems pursuant to a directed share program being administered by FleetBoston Robertson Stephens Inc., and that approximately half of these shares, pursuant to a directed share program being administered by Wit Capital Corporation, will be offered to open source software developers and other persons that we believe have contributed to the success of the open source software community and to the growth of Caldera Systems. We cannot assure you that any of the reserved shares will be so purchased. The number of shares of common stock available for sale to the general public in this offering will be reduced by the number of reserved shares sold. Any reserved shares not purchased will be offered to the general public on the same basis as the other shares offered in this offering.
Purchases of the reserved shares pursuant to the directed share program administered by Wit Capital are to be made through an account at Wit Capital in accordance with Wit Capital's procedures for opening an account and transacting in securities. In addition, Wit Capital is an underwriter of additional shares in the offering. A prospectus in electronic format is being made available on an Internet web site maintained by Wit Capital. In addition, all dealers purchasing common shares from Wit Capital in this offering have agreed to make a prospectus in electronic format available on a web site maintained by each of them. Other than the prospectus in electronic format, the information on the web site and any information contained on any other web site maintained by Wit Capital or any dealer purchasing common shares from it is not part of this prospectus or the registration statement of which this prospectus forms a part, has not been approved or endorsed by us or any underwriter in its capacity as underwriter and should not be relied on by prospective investors. The National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. approved the membership of Wit Capital on September 4, 1997. Since that time, Wit Capital has acted as a co-lead managing underwriter on one offering, a co-managing underwriter on 61 offerings and a dealer on 107 offerings.
Slashdot Mirror
At least in a paper voting world, there needs to be some semblance of a paper trail record to be available for recounting.
While such systems can be manipulated, it takes quite a lot of people in the loop to do so. Voter early, vote often; run a steel rod through any Republican ballots in Democratic areas...
The move to scannable ballots using sharpie markers is a bit better but physical security of those are questionable as they allow thermal printouts and often have the covers open at the polling places.
Right now, if I want to steal an election, I probably have to bury my opponent in the places that I control the entire polling apparatus with my political party hacks. It looks crude and messy to anyone who watches.
Now if we have all the local precincts reporting frequently into a central computer system with two way back door communications; we can easily determine the number of manufactured ballots needed and allocate them over a greater number of precincts without drawing any attention at all.
An example of this is a weighted average cost bid, I have personal experience with this. If we know that there are two items on the list; one says it will buy a million of an item and the other says it will buy 3 of the item but the quantities are reversed. I can make my evaluated bid much lower and rape the buyer by biddin no cost for the first item and $10,000 for the second item (assuming both are worth $1000); however the bid will look really, really abnormal compared to the other bidders and they are going to smell a rat even if they don't know the real quantities to be bought.
However, were I to just shade the bid a bit by lowering the cost on one and raising on the other I could win the bid, have higher margins and no one be any the wiser. OK, the example of a million vs 3 is too extreme but so is the ballot count for Democrats in these key urban areas coming in higher than the total number of living and dead there.
If the election comes in as the controlling power wishes, there is no need to do anything. If it is off track, they can certainly round up people on buses to vote but they can also create some new ballots that will be totally untraceable.
All electronic balloting is not to be trusted.
Computers do many wonderful things, counting elections is not one of them.
D
The only purpose to use completely electronic voting whether by voting machine or web services, is to make it easier to steal elections without the messy paper trail of paper ballots or the need to double punch those unwanted Republican ballots.
Of course there is no security. The idea is to know ahead of time at the central computers how many votes are needed so they can be added in quietly with smoothed data and not the mass stuffed ballot boxes of so many past stolen elections.
David
I encourage people to write to their website in protest. This will only make it more expensive to travel and not add any security at all. Mineta won't allo the pilots, mostly former military, to have real guns.
Personally I would pass out Glocks at the door to anyone willing to take one. Just like folks are asked aboout sitting in the emergency exits.
An armed air society is a polite one.
Here are my comments to then:
I am writing in response to an AP article tha NWA wishes to use biometrics on passengers.
As an IT professional and a privacy advocate, I am strongly opposed to plans to implement human biometrices for passenger check ins.
In fact if NWA goes ahead with its plans to use biometrics I will do anything and everything possible to not patronize NWA personally or through any of the companies that I control or participate in.
This is a patently silly idea. It offeres no security advantage whatsoever. Why doesn't NWA work on securing the 802.11b wireless networks in use to ensure that passenger bags match the passenger manifests? Such networks are known to be susceptible to hacking and can be an entry point into the system to tamper with passenger and baggage records.
There is no need for additional id requirements over and above the current requirements for a government issued photo id.
If the biometrics kept on the card, then the cards themselves are subject to tamper. If the biometrics are kept online then we have a whole new world of private company privacy invasion. Moreover it would still be possible to tamper with and evade such a system.
Even proposed facial recognition systems applied to a large population will yield a substantial amount of false positives.
Since these terrorists are adept at manipulating systems and people, it is unlikely that the next group will be in anyones database.
How many grey haired grannies and grandpas are we willing to subject to close body searches in the name of political correctness?
In the end, biometrices add zero security at great cost to personal privacy and muliple millions in excessive costs passed on to consumers.
Anyone believing in biometrics would do well to refer to the writings of Douglas Adams who posited that once we had all been poked and prodded enough for DNA samples and the like we would put all that information into a universal identity card which of course makes it incredibly easy to steal someone else's identity.
Snce you guys want to be Big Brother you can look up my Frequent Flyer number yourself.
David Sussman
dsussman@earthlink.net
# Northwest Wants Eye-Scan Check-Ins Airline Seeks Approval For Test
1024869783
VTS
Email This Story
Print This Story
(AP) (EAGAN, Minn.) Jun 20, 2002 1:11 pm US/Central
Northwest Airlines wants to test a check-in system that uses cards with encrypted eye scans.
Northwest and other major carriers plan to ask the Transportation Security Administration next month for permission to test the system.
A company official said Northwest hopes that the system will give its frequent flyers a faster way to get through security.
If it is approved, Northwest will use its employees to start the pilot program by this fall at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
If the pilot program succeeds, Northwest would expand it to customers and implement it at other hubs in Detroit and Memphis, then elsewhere.
Privacy advocates have raised warnings about identity card systems, saying that the government would need to safeguard personal data and maintaining that existing technologies are not foolproof.
(© 2002 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
No word on their changing their business practices or actual shipping dates.
David
MIR Crash Prediction 2001-03-20 12:00:00 how about mid day on my birthday?
The specific text from the filing is on page 69 and 70 of the document, on my printed copy it was pages 74 and 75 of 393...
They say half of the 10% Directed Share Program goes to company employees and insiders and the other half to the Linux community via a program at Wit Capital. Apart from needing to fund a $2,000 account at Wit Capital, there is no more information about the program. I have an email in to ask of this at Wit.
Anyone have more details?
Here goes:
Directed Share Program. At our request, the underwriters have reserved for sale, at the initial public offering price, up to ten percent of the shares of common stock offered in this offering under a directed share program. We currently expect that approximately half of these shares will be offered to directors, officers, employees, business associates, and related persons of Caldera Systems pursuant to a directed share program being administered by FleetBoston Robertson Stephens Inc., and that approximately half of these shares, pursuant to a directed share program being administered by Wit Capital Corporation, will be offered to open source software developers and other persons that we believe have contributed to the success of the open source software community and to the growth of Caldera Systems. We cannot assure you that any of the reserved shares will be so purchased. The number of shares of common stock available for sale to the general public in this offering will be reduced by the number of reserved shares sold. Any reserved shares not purchased will be offered to the general public on the same basis as the other shares offered in this offering.
Purchases of the reserved shares pursuant to the directed share program administered by Wit Capital are to be made through an account at Wit Capital in accordance with Wit Capital's procedures for opening an account and transacting in securities. In addition, Wit Capital is an underwriter of additional shares in the offering. A prospectus in electronic format is being made available on an Internet web site maintained by Wit Capital. In addition, all dealers purchasing common shares from Wit Capital in this offering have agreed to make a prospectus in electronic format available on a web site maintained by each of them. Other than the prospectus in electronic format, the information on the web site and any information contained on any other web site maintained by Wit Capital or any dealer purchasing common shares from it is not part of this prospectus or the registration statement of which this prospectus forms a part, has not been approved or endorsed by us or any underwriter in its capacity as underwriter and should not be relied on by prospective investors. The National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. approved the membership of Wit Capital on September 4, 1997. Since that time, Wit Capital has acted as a co-lead managing underwriter on one offering, a co-managing underwriter on 61 offerings and a dealer on 107 offerings.