The exact same thing happened to me when I worked for one of the Big Six accounting firms. We HATED it, and as it turned out, it was a harbinger of things to come. Prior to that date, we had nice corporate social events held in nice places where we all dressed up. Afterwards, it was beer and pretzels, or no social event at all.
It means that the bean counters are in control, and it's no longer going to be a fun place to work.
Why is it worth looking for experimental proof that when people feel emotions, their brain chemistry will be involved in the experience? This is already well understood. I don't understand the point of this study at all. You might as well conduct experiments to determine whether water is wet. Was there any question that a religious experience is also an emotional one? ANYTHING deeply felt will be physically manifested. Duh.
We don't "blindly" trust any computer systems used in voting today, what in the world makes you think that's the case? We've been running elections for 230 years straight, and we know a thing or two about how to lock down the process. We black-box test voting equipment, then we seal them and keep a tight chain of custody.
No, a human-readable summary of a ballot would tell you NOTHING. What kind of hacker do you think would print out evidence that the machine was hacked and give it to you? Please think about that for a minute. Of course the printed report would show what you THOUGHT you had voted.
The machines are validated by black-box testing, then sealed and delivered to the voting localities, where they are re-sealed. Good testing + good chain of custody = a secure process.
States run elections. Every state is different. In Virginia, where I live, recounts are regulated by law. A recount is possible only if the margin is below 1%. All recounts are optional in Virginia; the _loser_ has to request them. If the loser still winds up losing, they pay for the recount. If the margin is below 0.5%, then the state will pay -- but the loser still has to request it. Not all do.
"The only thing good about blockchain tech is that its decentralized."
Which is exactly the situation with our food chain, which involves hundreds of decentralized participants. So, blockchain makes a ton of sense.
Sadly, the article is silent on some important details. If you dig into the IBM announcement, you find that they are putting the entire chain of custody records into a blockchain, from source to the consumer -- all the things that traditionally would have gone into production logs, shipping manifests, etc. right down to the final delivery to the home. So, much, much more than what can be contained in a tracking barcode.
Geez, it's like no one ever thought of protecting the counters by making a hand-written backup of those numbers after the machines have been certified, but before voting begins.
I am a volunteer poll worker in Virginia. Not only do we record in pen those numbers when we open the equipment, we do a running comparison of the public counter totals to the total number of people who were checked-in on the poll books, every hour. If those numbers are off by even 1, it is a major event, we have to make an immediate report by phone to the registrar, write up what happened on an audit log, and explain it again to the local Board of Elections that evening.
You go messing with those numbers, and you would be caught within the hour in Virginia. Nice try.
FTA: "Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence."
Oh, you mean like the SSH setup I have for all my servers to only listen to known IPs for shell access? Uh, yeah, no kidding.
Geez, politics can make people so stupid.
That was the whole point of paying for TV. No ads! And, boy, was it worth it. Now you've got the worst of both worlds, you pay out of pocket AND they crush you with commercials.
Frankly, the reason TV is being taken over by Netflix et al. has everything to do with getting rid of ads.
"If the President says it, it's legal" - Richard Nixon "If it's done in secret, legality is irrelevant." - Barak Obama "Laws are for the little people." - Hillary Clinton "I love laws. I have the best lawyers. Absolutely the best." - Donald Trump
I love this guy's take on "the one thing everybody should be doing a whole lot more of": Backup your stinkin' data. And then make a backup of your backup.
I couldn't agree more. This, for me, is why I will never, ever stop using Dropbox or its equivalent. Every user in my family circle gets backed up to Dropbox. I bought a couple of network storage boxes, and use them to backup Dropbox.
In all the years and years I've been using computers, data loss is the only thing that has ever truly hurt me. Bad guys? Meh. I use credit cards. My losses are limited to $50. And, that's only money.
Man, what IS it with the Japanese and robots? That video is profoundly creepy. Every culture looks weird from the outside I guess. Gun ownership looks weird if you weren't born in the US. Telling your mini creepy clown robot your deepest emotions looks weird if you weren't born in Japan.
The Justice Department grants immunity, not the FBI. When Comey said "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring the case, he wasn't saying it's because the evidence is insufficient, he was saying it's because the evidence is unobtainable. Not only unobtainable, but completely legally so. If you can get an entire federal government agency to shield you, you can never be touched.
Apparently, you can't fight City Hall -- or the Justice Department.
The relevance is that the FBI granted immunity to the only two people in this saga who knew what really happened to the government-owned records, and those people took the fifth when testifying. So, it looks like an official cover-up.
FBI Director Comey said that "no reasonable prosecutor" would have prosecuted the case, yet he grants immunity from prosecution. Why? If no one is going to prosecute, then immunity makes no sense. The purpose of granting immunity to a small fish is so you can prosecute a bigger fish.
Further, why have these IT folks gone even beyond their protection against immunity to refuse to testify? What could they possibly say that would be prosecutable? Nothing.
Everyone is staying quiet. As long as no one says anything, everyone is protected.
Speaking as an older person, I can attest that life does, indeed, suck as you start to get older. However, it takes time -- sometimes decades -- between the time when something starts to go south and the time when you really just can't do it anymore.
So for both our elderly candidates, no doubt there are many things they can't do anymore. Parkinson's is just one problem of many. When it really becomes an issue, then it matters. Until then, just keep that drug handy, your feet firmly on the floor, and hold on to the handrails.
It might just the way we're set up at work, but getting Box to sync on a Mac has always been problematic. I almost always wind up going to the web site and manually downloading and uploading the files I want to work on.
By contrast, Dropbox sync has always worked very well for me. I've used the Dropbox software on an amazing variety of devices, and it works perfectly every time.
No one trust human beings to count hundreds of millions of individual pieces of paper, tally up dozens of markings, and come to anything like the same number even two times in a row. We invented machines to REMOVE humans from the equation.
The benefit of a paper ballot is that it is a second, parallel data protocol, and thus can serve as a true audit.
Spot on. Election fraud is a non-trivial problem, and people have been working on securing it for generations. The biggest risk is allowing people who get elected from deciding how an election is run. In any state where choosing an election district is a political act, that is a huge risk. Unfortunately, only a handful of states use a non-partisan process. The second biggest risk is in letting elected officials define the voting registration rules. In any state where the major parties are not basically in balance, an attempt will be made to skew the results. The courts can and do push back, such as happened recently in North Carolina. And, voters can rebel if the rules are really unfair. Until recently, the federal government was also involved in the Southern states, but federal oversight actually makes things more complicated and less trustworthy, not more.
You folks need to volunteer to run an election sometime so you can understand how an election is secured. I am a volunteer poll worker in Virginia. We use a deep defense-in-depth strategy to protect against fraud. Fraud is a non-trivial problem that is technically difficult to solve, because it can take so many different forms and because there are so many people involved. We are dead serious about election integrity, and at least in Virginia, we do hourly audits as an election proceeds. If we are off by even 1 voter in our audit, it is a major event with an immediate inquiry.
When I read about Russia sowing distrust, I nod my head because not many people understand how elections are run. It is easy to be distrustful of something you don't understand. But when I read about Russia actually being able to do anything material to effect the counting itself, I laugh because it would take such a massive effort that it would actually be easier and more reliable to just use normal bribery to get what you wanted. Something like the Clinton Foundation is the way to do it, that's a marvel of efficiency in terms of hooking up money with political outcomes. Even better that it stays just on the right side of the line, legally (well, at least "provably", which is really the crux of the matter.)
One of these days, I need to write that book on the election process. I became a volunteer more than a decade ago after reading one of these articles on hacking voting equipment. I was curious about how feasible that really was, and was very, very impressed with just how difficult it would be to actually do it.
"Jane Got A Gun", a western starring Natalie Portman, is finally streaming on Netflix. Now, there's a move where the woman is not only more beautiful than average, but more extreme in every trait!
Where [bang]! Is [bang]! My [bang]! CHILD [bang]!
Yikes! She sure made me a believer in that character. Actually because Portman is really much more beautiful than average, they wrote that into the script and made it a plot element. Pretty smart.
A very enjoyable movie. I don't care a whistle about gender equality in movies. I only care whether the movie is a good one.
Slashdot Mirror
Bring back the codpiece!
The exact same thing happened to me when I worked for one of the Big Six accounting firms. We HATED it, and as it turned out, it was a harbinger of things to come. Prior to that date, we had nice corporate social events held in nice places where we all dressed up. Afterwards, it was beer and pretzels, or no social event at all. It means that the bean counters are in control, and it's no longer going to be a fun place to work.
Tell me how this is any different than what China does, then. You might as well have a Ministry of Truth.
Why is it worth looking for experimental proof that when people feel emotions, their brain chemistry will be involved in the experience? This is already well understood. I don't understand the point of this study at all. You might as well conduct experiments to determine whether water is wet. Was there any question that a religious experience is also an emotional one? ANYTHING deeply felt will be physically manifested. Duh.
Man, I hope the taxpayers didn't pay for this.
We don't "blindly" trust any computer systems used in voting today, what in the world makes you think that's the case? We've been running elections for 230 years straight, and we know a thing or two about how to lock down the process. We black-box test voting equipment, then we seal them and keep a tight chain of custody.
No, a human-readable summary of a ballot would tell you NOTHING. What kind of hacker do you think would print out evidence that the machine was hacked and give it to you? Please think about that for a minute. Of course the printed report would show what you THOUGHT you had voted. The machines are validated by black-box testing, then sealed and delivered to the voting localities, where they are re-sealed. Good testing + good chain of custody = a secure process.
States run elections. Every state is different. In Virginia, where I live, recounts are regulated by law. A recount is possible only if the margin is below 1%. All recounts are optional in Virginia; the _loser_ has to request them. If the loser still winds up losing, they pay for the recount. If the margin is below 0.5%, then the state will pay -- but the loser still has to request it. Not all do.
"The only thing good about blockchain tech is that its decentralized." Which is exactly the situation with our food chain, which involves hundreds of decentralized participants. So, blockchain makes a ton of sense.
Sadly, the article is silent on some important details. If you dig into the IBM announcement, you find that they are putting the entire chain of custody records into a blockchain, from source to the consumer -- all the things that traditionally would have gone into production logs, shipping manifests, etc. right down to the final delivery to the home. So, much, much more than what can be contained in a tracking barcode.
Geez, it's like no one ever thought of protecting the counters by making a hand-written backup of those numbers after the machines have been certified, but before voting begins.
I am a volunteer poll worker in Virginia. Not only do we record in pen those numbers when we open the equipment, we do a running comparison of the public counter totals to the total number of people who were checked-in on the poll books, every hour. If those numbers are off by even 1, it is a major event, we have to make an immediate report by phone to the registrar, write up what happened on an audit log, and explain it again to the local Board of Elections that evening.
You go messing with those numbers, and you would be caught within the hour in Virginia. Nice try.
FTA: "Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence." Oh, you mean like the SSH setup I have for all my servers to only listen to known IPs for shell access? Uh, yeah, no kidding. Geez, politics can make people so stupid.
That was the whole point of paying for TV. No ads! And, boy, was it worth it. Now you've got the worst of both worlds, you pay out of pocket AND they crush you with commercials. Frankly, the reason TV is being taken over by Netflix et al. has everything to do with getting rid of ads.
"If the President says it, it's legal" - Richard Nixon
"If it's done in secret, legality is irrelevant." - Barak Obama
"Laws are for the little people." - Hillary Clinton
"I love laws. I have the best lawyers. Absolutely the best." - Donald Trump
I love this guy's take on "the one thing everybody should be doing a whole lot more of": Backup your stinkin' data. And then make a backup of your backup.
I couldn't agree more. This, for me, is why I will never, ever stop using Dropbox or its equivalent. Every user in my family circle gets backed up to Dropbox. I bought a couple of network storage boxes, and use them to backup Dropbox.
In all the years and years I've been using computers, data loss is the only thing that has ever truly hurt me. Bad guys? Meh. I use credit cards. My losses are limited to $50. And, that's only money.
My data is the one thing I can never replace.
Oh dear God, no. The federal government doesn't know its right hand from its left, and now you want them to pick Netflix Movies? *shudder*
Man, what IS it with the Japanese and robots? That video is profoundly creepy. Every culture looks weird from the outside I guess. Gun ownership looks weird if you weren't born in the US. Telling your mini creepy clown robot your deepest emotions looks weird if you weren't born in Japan.
The Justice Department grants immunity, not the FBI. When Comey said "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring the case, he wasn't saying it's because the evidence is insufficient, he was saying it's because the evidence is unobtainable. Not only unobtainable, but completely legally so. If you can get an entire federal government agency to shield you, you can never be touched.
Apparently, you can't fight City Hall -- or the Justice Department.
Yes, that explains why the IT people would accept a deal, but not why the FBI would offer it.
The relevance is that the FBI granted immunity to the only two people in this saga who knew what really happened to the government-owned records, and those people took the fifth when testifying. So, it looks like an official cover-up.
FBI Director Comey said that "no reasonable prosecutor" would have prosecuted the case, yet he grants immunity from prosecution. Why? If no one is going to prosecute, then immunity makes no sense. The purpose of granting immunity to a small fish is so you can prosecute a bigger fish.
Further, why have these IT folks gone even beyond their protection against immunity to refuse to testify? What could they possibly say that would be prosecutable? Nothing.
Everyone is staying quiet. As long as no one says anything, everyone is protected.
Speaking as an older person, I can attest that life does, indeed, suck as you start to get older. However, it takes time -- sometimes decades -- between the time when something starts to go south and the time when you really just can't do it anymore.
So for both our elderly candidates, no doubt there are many things they can't do anymore. Parkinson's is just one problem of many. When it really becomes an issue, then it matters. Until then, just keep that drug handy, your feet firmly on the floor, and hold on to the handrails.
It might just the way we're set up at work, but getting Box to sync on a Mac has always been problematic. I almost always wind up going to the web site and manually downloading and uploading the files I want to work on.
By contrast, Dropbox sync has always worked very well for me. I've used the Dropbox software on an amazing variety of devices, and it works perfectly every time.
Paper ballots are COUNTED ELECTRONICALLY.
No one trust human beings to count hundreds of millions of individual pieces of paper, tally up dozens of markings, and come to anything like the same number even two times in a row. We invented machines to REMOVE humans from the equation.
The benefit of a paper ballot is that it is a second, parallel data protocol, and thus can serve as a true audit.
Spot on. Election fraud is a non-trivial problem, and people have been working on securing it for generations. The biggest risk is allowing people who get elected from deciding how an election is run. In any state where choosing an election district is a political act, that is a huge risk. Unfortunately, only a handful of states use a non-partisan process. The second biggest risk is in letting elected officials define the voting registration rules. In any state where the major parties are not basically in balance, an attempt will be made to skew the results. The courts can and do push back, such as happened recently in North Carolina. And, voters can rebel if the rules are really unfair. Until recently, the federal government was also involved in the Southern states, but federal oversight actually makes things more complicated and less trustworthy, not more.
You folks need to volunteer to run an election sometime so you can understand how an election is secured. I am a volunteer poll worker in Virginia. We use a deep defense-in-depth strategy to protect against fraud. Fraud is a non-trivial problem that is technically difficult to solve, because it can take so many different forms and because there are so many people involved. We are dead serious about election integrity, and at least in Virginia, we do hourly audits as an election proceeds. If we are off by even 1 voter in our audit, it is a major event with an immediate inquiry.
When I read about Russia sowing distrust, I nod my head because not many people understand how elections are run. It is easy to be distrustful of something you don't understand. But when I read about Russia actually being able to do anything material to effect the counting itself, I laugh because it would take such a massive effort that it would actually be easier and more reliable to just use normal bribery to get what you wanted. Something like the Clinton Foundation is the way to do it, that's a marvel of efficiency in terms of hooking up money with political outcomes. Even better that it stays just on the right side of the line, legally (well, at least "provably", which is really the crux of the matter.)
One of these days, I need to write that book on the election process. I became a volunteer more than a decade ago after reading one of these articles on hacking voting equipment. I was curious about how feasible that really was, and was very, very impressed with just how difficult it would be to actually do it.
"Jane Got A Gun", a western starring Natalie Portman, is finally streaming on Netflix. Now, there's a move where the woman is not only more beautiful than average, but more extreme in every trait!
Where [bang]! Is [bang]! My [bang]! CHILD [bang]!
Yikes! She sure made me a believer in that character. Actually because Portman is really much more beautiful than average, they wrote that into the script and made it a plot element. Pretty smart.
A very enjoyable movie. I don't care a whistle about gender equality in movies. I only care whether the movie is a good one.