Yes, it really does. If you buy an irrevocable license to something, the person you bought it from *can't* revoke it unless you violate the terms of the license. Physical goods are a bit more problematic as the goods can be physically recaptured - we call that theft unless the new owner paid fraudulently, but it can still be problematic for the legitimate owner.
A license though is a legal construct - it exists only insofar as the courts will enforce it, and the courts aren't going to enforce a copyright violation claim when the defendant is holding a signed contract giving them the license and you can't offer any reason to invalidate it.
Apple lost rights to distribute things through the store? Fine. That shouldn't mean they've lost the rights to maintain and provide access to the personal copies already sold and stored in their cloud. If it does, then that's a failure of their negotiation, or a failure to clearly enough state the limitations of their service.
>A meaningless kind of role-playing.... and you just described 90% of high school. The entire environment is horribly artificial, and generally manages to completely miss the point of even the education. Knowledge rots without usage, and it's a rare class that teaches you the skills to effectively use that knowledge outside of class.
I am sorry nobody challenged you to make your presentations worth the time to listen to, much less prepare. I seriously doubt you had any presentations that were literally regurgitating classroom content, where a little independent research couldn't have added a great deal of additional information and classroom merit (and maybe even improved your grade). I had some teachers early on that made it clear that was the *point* of giving a presentation, and never encountered one in all my years that objected. I was shy and pretty much always hated having to give presentations, but at least I learned early on that the point was to practice conveying information, wish I had caught on earlier that it was also about engaging the audience. If you can engage an initially utterly indifferent classroom audience about an arbitrary topic... that's a skill set that will serve you well whenever you need to convey information or influence decisions. Sort of throwing you into the lion's den on that front, but it's a large enough audience that you can probably interest at least one or two enough to pay attention. Probably help if there were an explicit speech-giving course squeezed in there at some point.
Who said anything about liking public speaking? You don't have to like it, you just have to *do* it. One of those life skills that, unless you never have to interview in your life, is going to come in handy no matter how much you hate it.
IF that were the case, then it would still be Apple's fault for not negotiating a contract with the copyright holder that allowed them to deliver the goods they claimed to be selling.
If they had negotiated an appropriate license, then there would be no way for the copyright holder to renege.
> but the regulations could be modernized and improved.
They certainly could - patents could be made perpetual, and it could be made illegal to make a drug that competes in any way with any competitor's drug.
Oh, you meant better for patients and the public good? First we'd need to hire politicians that are more interested in serving the public good than lining their pockets. Good luck with that.
If it were just wealth, I might agree. Some degree of wealth concentration is almost certainly good for society - being able to improve your lot in life through your own efforts is a powerful motivating force, probably greatly for the better of society. So long as wealth concentrates no faster than new wealth is created, a rising tide will indeed lift all boats.
Unfortunately, it's not just wealth that concentrates - power and opportunity concentrate along with it, and that's a problem for democracy. Especially so in a society like the U.S. that hasn't socialized basic "social utilities" like medical care and education. And wealth buys a greatly outsized voice in politics pretty much everywhere.
And when that happens the rate of wealth concentration tends to spiral upwards, and when wealth concentrates faster than it's generated, then the gains of the rich come at the expense of the poor and middle class. And that is an inherent problem - one that's plagued virtually every capitalist society on Earth.
It might not always be immediately obvious - I mean if median wealth has increased by 20%, and the wealth of the rich has increased by 30%, then everybody still wins, right? The problem is when that trend continues over time it means the rich can claim an ever-growing share of the power and opportunity, while drifting ever further out of touch with what life is like for normal people. And whether it's capitalism, "communism", or anything in between, that's always gone badly for the masses.
On a bit of a tangent, it's also worth noting that not all wealth is created equal - There's what you might call "core assets" like health (medical care, healthy food, etc.), real estate, education, etc. that allow you to improve your lot in life. And then there's "luxury goods" - TVs, smartphones, vacations, etc. which are basically consumables and have little to no value in improving your lot. And generally speaking, while the cost of luxury goods, as measured in percentage of median income, has been consistently falling, the cost of "core assets" has been consistently rising. The net result being that most measures of wealth inequality, which treat both classes of wealth equally, give a much rosier picture than actually exists.
It doesn't matter how important you know investing is, if you can't afford to do it. And a large percentage of people in this country are already neglecting even their own health for lack of income - and that's an investment with even greater payoffs.
Not to mention around 80% of the U.S. population has some form of debt - and paying off debt generally offers the best return on investment you can get.
Investors certainly have their value, especially compared to a centrally planned economy (though you must admit China's hybrid approach seems to be very effective as well) The problem comes when the investors manage to capture the lion's share of the wealth being generated, while market pricing for labor severely undervalues their contribution.
In that same vein, it's also a problem when capital is given decidedly preferential treatment by the government over labor - e.g. capital gains are taxed much lower than earned income, and investors are given strong legal protections against facing repercussions for malfeasance of their company, while labor get no such protections.
Perhaps those things are actually necessary to stimulate investing, though we could debate about whether increased economic growth at the expense of socially irresponsible investing is actually a net boon to society (keeping in mind that economic growth is itself only a net boon to society if most people benefit from it). But the inevitable result of the game we've created is extreme wealth and power concentration - it needs a counterpoint to ensure that society as a whole benefits, rather than just the lucky few born into the investor class.
That might be how it used to work (but probably not). But today it doesn't work that way at all - 84% of stocks in the U.S. are owned by the top 10% of population - the investor class who make their money by investing rather than working (or quite likely by playing the market, which isn't quite the same thing as investing).
Only another 4% of the population owns stocks directly. And half the population doesn't even own any stocks indirectly through retirement plans, etc.
Factory workers investing their savings, directly or indirectly, are lost somewhere in that 16% of stock not owned by the 10%, and are not remotely representative of investors in general.
That's true so long as investments are rewarded commensurate with their contribution - but that is rarely the case. What usually happens is that the investors capture the lion's share of the profits, while labor is paid as little as possible.
After all, labor is almost always paid according to the (not remotely free) market, which is to say according to the incremental value of the last employee, or alternately the cost of replacing an employee, rather than according to the actual value provided by the employee.
A similar thing happens with water - water is essential to life, and thus its inherent value is immense. But the market doesn't price it according to its inherent value, but rather at the incremental value of the of the last gallon you buy, at which point (unless its incredibly scarce) you already have plenty to drink and wash with, and more is almost worthless.
Investors are also typically very well protected against any malfeasance on their part (i.e. by the board or executives acting on their behalf), a benefit not offered to employees.
Both are absolutely important - but today we live in a world where investment is treated far preferentially - e.g. capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate than earned income, and investor-driven malfeasance is typically well protected by corporate, LLC, etc. protections, while labor malfeasance is not.
Also, they are not equally important - ask yourself, what the world would look like without major capital investment (e.g. most of human history), versus without labor (e.g. everybody starves).
Investments don't create wealth - they capture it. Wealth is generated by the person on the factory floor making something someone will buy, or the person providing a service that someone will buy. Everything else is just a question of how that wealth gets distributed,.
So don't use a device that raises interrupts - do away with the USB bus and access the hardware directly, lots of devices do that. Or limit yourself to an extremely bare-bones interrupt handler - think DOS as the operating system, not Windows. If your total OS is more than a few tens of KB you've added a massive amount of unnecessary vulnerabilities.
Seems like you agree there's a ballot-stuffing risk, so how do you address it? I gave you one example that would be very effective and minimally cumbersome, which you don't like. So what's your solution?
>and no your computer can't simply ignore it: writing simply doesn't work. Everything I've read says that the restriction is enforced at the driver level for almost all SD card readers - which means a compromised driver or purpose-modified SD card reader will let you ignore it. It *could* be enforced at the card level - but would make the card more expensive, so (almost?) nobody does so - much like including write protect switches on USB flash drives I suppose. Purpose built hardware for elections? I'd love to see it - but suspect most municipalities would opt for the cheaper route.
Yes - while I'm not going to do an in-depth analysis of your sample code, a simple enough format, and a rigorous enough auditing of the code, should make it possible to approach 100% confidence that it's not a potential attack vector.
It has to handle software interrupts, display systems, storage routines, and the like. You also have to have a way to write this complex, graphical software in a manner which is human-maintainable and as little prone to software flaws as possible--and we all know software always has flaws.
Why? You're thinking like a Windows programmer whose grown accustomed to writing code for general-purpose OS. What do you need interrupts for that couldn't be handled with polling? Your system/software storage can be EEPROM, or similarly configured flash, easily accessed via mapping into memory space (many embedded systems do it that way). Your input is trivial - a few buttons or maybe a touch-screen, easy to poll for "current input state", which is all you really need since you're sitting completely idle waiting for an input. And what is this complex, graphical software you're talking about? You're recording ballots, not simulating physics or playing video games. And graphical? You're planning to include photos of the candidates? Otherwise you're just talking text in boxes - easily done with "graphical" text characters. Even with photos you're talking drawing graphical boxes and some crude bitmap loading and blitting for photos and text characters.
It's also why I suggested a two-stage recording process - ballots get tallied, but not committed without official approval. The only votes that can be tampered with are those currently in a "pending" status - and there's no reason they should remain there for more than a few moments - the only purpose is to make sure only one vote is cast, rather than an armful.
This is security theater.
No, it's insurance against ballot stuffing. Without that, if someone manages to post even one extra vote (slips in an extra SD card or whatever), how do you invalidate those votes? Once the ballot is in the box you can't extract it - unless you're storing them as a nice orderly list so that anyone recording voters entering the booth can tell exactly how everybody voted - and there are a lot of good reasons to prefer a secret vote.
We don't need electronic voting to make the system easy to invisibly compromise - we just need a standardized compromise-resistant processes that's easy to publicly verify
Yeah, we've spent a hundred years working on that. It doesn't work.
No, we really haven't. As proved by the fact that we're still dealing with utter lackadaisical chaos around elections, and everyone thinks that's okay. And what makes you think you can make the requisite handling of electronic voting systems by techno-incompentents is going to do any better?
read-only SD card
Do they make those? I've never heard of such a thing - certainly the write protection tab on a normal SD card is only a suggestion that the controlling device is free to ignore. But okay, sure, theoretically you could build a card that is electrically incapable of being written to when locked.
The "few unsupervised moments" you need are between poll open and poll close; and the "vulnerable point" is a long and complex process of entering the ballot box itself, rebooting onto alternate media, switching back to the original media, changing the system image, and bringing the system back to up-and-running. It's maybe a few minutes of downtime if you're heavily prepared. You can, of course, rig the ballot box to display visual and auditory alarm when entered; and if it's logging a heartbeat to the log collector, you'll have to enter the log collector and deploy fake heartbeat events and somehow try to keep those in sync with one-way communicatio
And I'm sure they prefer hiring candidates who, by their selection of email provider, have already shown they're okay with it.
Also, I'm sorry for your bad experiences with overbearing employers - I recommend avoiding working for a corporation, or any business with more than a few dozen employees. Human decency doesn't seem to survive well at those scales.
I'm a programmer, I've got a pretty good idea how software works - and if you say it's not feasible for carefully crafted data to invoke unintended behavior in the data-reading routines and take control of the software, then you have no business even attempting to building such a product. But yes - a sufficiently simple file format with sufficiently robust validation should make that difficult - just make sure your validation tool is at least as robust as your data parsing routine.
>An OS handles inputs and outputs, along with process scheduling. Process scheduling? What the hell sort of bloated attack-friendly voting system are you trying to create? It's a voting machine - single-threaded single-tasking is completely sufficient for the job. A voting machine only needs to read setup data, display very simple data, recognize very simple inputs, do a bit of tallying, and output the results - again onto a raw device. An arduino could do the job, and if you have more than a few kB worth of system-operating code then you've grossly over-engineered your system and made it radically vulnerable in the process. Hell, there are entire very powerful spreadsheet applications from the DOS days where the entire suite, including a minimal O.S., was only a few hundred KB - there's absolutely no excuse for a voting machine to have more software than that, it just adds more attack surfaces and makes validation *far* more difficult (at a guess, I'd say thorough validation increases geometrically, perhaps even exponentially, with the numbers of lines of code). Oh, and you'd best have the entire source code for the O.S. and voting software public, and verifiable that it does in fact compile to create the image used, or the rest of your security is pointless. After all, the whole point of securing an election is that you can't trust *anyone*
>Whenever you take an action to intervene--if you step in and un-stuff ballots when someone sneaks extra smart cards in--you have a chance to pull some sleight-of-hand and tamper with votes. Prevention preserves integrity.
Absolutely. However, that's no excuse to not report something that does get by your prevention routines somehow. No prevention is 100% perfect, and "we can't fix it" is no excuse for not reporting that it's broken. Worst case scenario if a precinct's vote is compromised you can re-do the vote, or have a PR disaster on your hands. But if you don't even detect or report the compromise, then you've just handed the election to the enemy.
It's also why I suggested a two-stage recording process - ballots get tallied, but not committed without official approval. The only votes that can be tampered with are those currently in a "pending" status - and there's no reason they should remain there for more than a few moments - the only purpose is to make sure only one vote is cast, rather than an armful. The paper-ballot equivalent would be for voters to drop their ballots into a glass box, where an election official has to trigger the bottom to open into the official ballot box. The entire process is visible to everyone, and nobody leaves until they've seen their ballot leave the glass box into the official one. If someone drops in an armload of ballots, they get arrested for election tampering, and the glass box gets opened and shredded, and everyone whose votes hadn't yet been committed votes again.
>Creates bottlenecks and people who leave won't necessarily know their votes were confirmed. You're opening for official intervention, which opens up for tampering. You don't need much of a bottleneck - people are already monitoring that people aren't obviously voting several times, all they need is a "confirm/cancel button to push - no reason they couldn't push it after each voter leaves the booth - they're just making sure the ballot counter doesn't suddenly go up by 100 when only one person votes. You just tell people "after you've voted, don't leave until you see the counter increase" - along with bright flashing "voter fraud" alarm
What if the your smart card is corrupted in such a manner as to exploit a flaw in your data-reading routines to corrupt the software itself? That's a notoriously vulnerable attack surface right there - we're *still* finding new ways to compromise data loading routines for common formats that are decades old, though you could hopefully simplify the format to . Heck, the smart-card formatting itself could be corrupted, attacking through the OS instead of the voting software. (Though I find it unconscionable that any voting machine would incorporate the huge attack surface of an OS in the first place)
> which the vote count display overhead is supposed to prevent, but then what? Then you know you have a problem. Just because an acceptable solution isn't readily apparent is no reason to avoid exposing the fact that your system has been compromised. If you want a high-integrity anything, the first responsibility is to do everything you can to ensure that any tampering is revealed. Dealing with it suitably is whole second problem.
Though - here's a possibility: the oversight officials have to push a "commit" button periodically to commit the last N temporarily recorded votes to the permanent record - or a cancel button to invalidate them. So long as that's done while the last N voters are still physically present they can recast their votes while the perpetrator is being arrested. They just need to stick around until they've confirmed their vote is committed.
Really though - why are you trying to do electronic voting at all? What _exactly_ is the point? As far as I can tell it's just a way to radically weaken an important civil institution in order to add some high-tech glitz. Paper ballots are unhackable, easy to use (unless designed deceptively - and that's easy to prevent by requiring them to, for example, be approved by a jury), and there are some extremely clever designs out there that manage to incorporate anonymity, verifiable end-to-end confirmation receipts, and the inability to prove to anyone else how you voted. Heck, mail out ballots beforehand and let people just drop them off for validation and eventual counting - they can take all the time they need, and voting proceeds quickly at the polling pace since all most people need to do is feed it through the validation scanner.
It's *far* easier to secure a physical ballot box, and doesn't take that long to count - especially since the volunteer pool for vote counters is directly proportional to the number of voters - just give everyone a 1% chance of being flagged for vote-counting duty and you could get the votes counted in a few minutes. Ideally votes should be counted at the polling place, immediately after the polls close. Or possibly even in several shifts throughout the day - every hour or two a new ballot box is put out and the old one gets counted - that should still be anonymous enough, and it would be easy to pull randomly flagged people out of line for a half-hour stint in the vote-tallying room next door - let them skip the waiting line for voting so that there's no serious added burden on people so selected. Use a tallying scanner too if you like for added integrity - each bundle of ballots gets counted, tallied by both computer and drafted volunteers, and if the tallies don't all agree, they get re tallied until it does. Heck, tally by computer at the beginning AND end of the process to make sure nothing got modified or misplaced (and potentially later recounted) before the bundle is sealed and labeled with its final tallies, never to be opened again except in case of recount.
Just like that we've solved almost all the existing problems with paper ballots - they're verified as valid when cast (heck, add a digital scale and your wall-count display to ensure nobody casts multiple ballots). You've done the tallying before ballots ever leave the polling place, and can report them to the central counting authority without them ever being unsupervised. Counting is completed shortly after the polls close, and you've not once trusted a computer without verifying its working properly.
Do you honestly believe that the problems with social media manipulation wouldn't exist if one of the decentralized, distributed social media platforms had dominated instead? Sure, there's some targeted ads in there that might not exist in a decentralized system, and manipulation of viewership by the central authority, but a whole lot of the problem is state-funded trolls and people's own hatefulness, idiocy, and credulity being amplified by the echo-chamber effect from self-grouping by disconnecting from conflicting views.
As far as I can see, those problems would only be worse if social media were decentralized, as it's very unlikely you could shut someone down even if you knew for certain they were part of a deceitful manipulation campaign - decentralization protects against censorship, for better *and* worse.
Hey, if you don't mind letting google spy on you in exchange for slightly better free email, you probably won't mind your boss spying on you either, right?
And you think doing housework doesn't qualify as "meaningful work that is appreciated by others"? Live somewhere where no one has done house work for a few months and get back to me on that.
The point is, with increasing automation we simply won't have traditional employment opportunities available - period. A small handful of people are all that's needed to run the machines that produce the wealth to sustain everyone (maybe a large double-handful if the work is spread around a lot). The rest will have to find value in work they don't get paid for. Either that or we'll have to create a lot of "makework"employment - public beautification and the like perhaps.
Really? Deprive them of imported fuel, fertilizers, and pesticides, vehicles and other machinery, etc. and I bet you most would have a very rude awakening as to just how self-sufficient they really are. Better off than city dwellers no doubt, but it'd still be mighty bleak and a lot of folks wouldn't make it.
You get an awful lot more people using that road, so the cost per person is far less. Estimates are that it costs an average of ~$1-3million per mile to build a rural paved 2-lane road ($3-5million in the city). Are you and your rural neighbors really paying for all that? I know mine aren't. In Denver you've got 4,000 people per square mile, with an average of 16 blocks per mile, or 32 miles of road per square mile (16 1-mile segments in each direction) - that's only 0.008 miles (14 yards) of road per person. And Denver isn't exactly a pinnacle of population density - New York averages 27,000 people per square mile.
In comparison though, the average population density of metrpopolitan areas in general (heavily biased by more spacious small towns and suburbs) is supposedly only ~280 people per square mile, so over 14 times lower than Denver, and the density of streets probably isn't dramatically larger - you still have blocks about the same size, the yards are just bigger and you have a lot fewer apartment buildings.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I'm pretty certain slavery is still practiced in most if not all nations - just without the benefit of being legal.
Yes, it really does. If you buy an irrevocable license to something, the person you bought it from *can't* revoke it unless you violate the terms of the license. Physical goods are a bit more problematic as the goods can be physically recaptured - we call that theft unless the new owner paid fraudulently, but it can still be problematic for the legitimate owner.
A license though is a legal construct - it exists only insofar as the courts will enforce it, and the courts aren't going to enforce a copyright violation claim when the defendant is holding a signed contract giving them the license and you can't offer any reason to invalidate it.
Apple lost rights to distribute things through the store? Fine. That shouldn't mean they've lost the rights to maintain and provide access to the personal copies already sold and stored in their cloud. If it does, then that's a failure of their negotiation, or a failure to clearly enough state the limitations of their service.
>A meaningless kind of role-playing. ... and you just described 90% of high school. The entire environment is horribly artificial, and generally manages to completely miss the point of even the education. Knowledge rots without usage, and it's a rare class that teaches you the skills to effectively use that knowledge outside of class.
I am sorry nobody challenged you to make your presentations worth the time to listen to, much less prepare. I seriously doubt you had any presentations that were literally regurgitating classroom content, where a little independent research couldn't have added a great deal of additional information and classroom merit (and maybe even improved your grade). I had some teachers early on that made it clear that was the *point* of giving a presentation, and never encountered one in all my years that objected. I was shy and pretty much always hated having to give presentations, but at least I learned early on that the point was to practice conveying information, wish I had caught on earlier that it was also about engaging the audience. If you can engage an initially utterly indifferent classroom audience about an arbitrary topic... that's a skill set that will serve you well whenever you need to convey information or influence decisions. Sort of throwing you into the lion's den on that front, but it's a large enough audience that you can probably interest at least one or two enough to pay attention. Probably help if there were an explicit speech-giving course squeezed in there at some point.
Who said anything about liking public speaking? You don't have to like it, you just have to *do* it. One of those life skills that, unless you never have to interview in your life, is going to come in handy no matter how much you hate it.
IF that were the case, then it would still be Apple's fault for not negotiating a contract with the copyright holder that allowed them to deliver the goods they claimed to be selling.
If they had negotiated an appropriate license, then there would be no way for the copyright holder to renege.
> but the regulations could be modernized and improved.
They certainly could - patents could be made perpetual, and it could be made illegal to make a drug that competes in any way with any competitor's drug.
Oh, you meant better for patients and the public good? First we'd need to hire politicians that are more interested in serving the public good than lining their pockets. Good luck with that.
If it were just wealth, I might agree. Some degree of wealth concentration is almost certainly good for society - being able to improve your lot in life through your own efforts is a powerful motivating force, probably greatly for the better of society. So long as wealth concentrates no faster than new wealth is created, a rising tide will indeed lift all boats.
Unfortunately, it's not just wealth that concentrates - power and opportunity concentrate along with it, and that's a problem for democracy. Especially so in a society like the U.S. that hasn't socialized basic "social utilities" like medical care and education. And wealth buys a greatly outsized voice in politics pretty much everywhere.
And when that happens the rate of wealth concentration tends to spiral upwards, and when wealth concentrates faster than it's generated, then the gains of the rich come at the expense of the poor and middle class. And that is an inherent problem - one that's plagued virtually every capitalist society on Earth.
It might not always be immediately obvious - I mean if median wealth has increased by 20%, and the wealth of the rich has increased by 30%, then everybody still wins, right? The problem is when that trend continues over time it means the rich can claim an ever-growing share of the power and opportunity, while drifting ever further out of touch with what life is like for normal people. And whether it's capitalism, "communism", or anything in between, that's always gone badly for the masses.
On a bit of a tangent, it's also worth noting that not all wealth is created equal - There's what you might call "core assets" like health (medical care, healthy food, etc.), real estate, education, etc. that allow you to improve your lot in life. And then there's "luxury goods" - TVs, smartphones, vacations, etc. which are basically consumables and have little to no value in improving your lot. And generally speaking, while the cost of luxury goods, as measured in percentage of median income, has been consistently falling, the cost of "core assets" has been consistently rising. The net result being that most measures of wealth inequality, which treat both classes of wealth equally, give a much rosier picture than actually exists.
It doesn't matter how important you know investing is, if you can't afford to do it. And a large percentage of people in this country are already neglecting even their own health for lack of income - and that's an investment with even greater payoffs.
Not to mention around 80% of the U.S. population has some form of debt - and paying off debt generally offers the best return on investment you can get.
Investors certainly have their value, especially compared to a centrally planned economy (though you must admit China's hybrid approach seems to be very effective as well) The problem comes when the investors manage to capture the lion's share of the wealth being generated, while market pricing for labor severely undervalues their contribution.
In that same vein, it's also a problem when capital is given decidedly preferential treatment by the government over labor - e.g. capital gains are taxed much lower than earned income, and investors are given strong legal protections against facing repercussions for malfeasance of their company, while labor get no such protections.
Perhaps those things are actually necessary to stimulate investing, though we could debate about whether increased economic growth at the expense of socially irresponsible investing is actually a net boon to society (keeping in mind that economic growth is itself only a net boon to society if most people benefit from it). But the inevitable result of the game we've created is extreme wealth and power concentration - it needs a counterpoint to ensure that society as a whole benefits, rather than just the lucky few born into the investor class.
That might be how it used to work (but probably not). But today it doesn't work that way at all - 84% of stocks in the U.S. are owned by the top 10% of population - the investor class who make their money by investing rather than working (or quite likely by playing the market, which isn't quite the same thing as investing).
Only another 4% of the population owns stocks directly. And half the population doesn't even own any stocks indirectly through retirement plans, etc.
Factory workers investing their savings, directly or indirectly, are lost somewhere in that 16% of stock not owned by the 10%, and are not remotely representative of investors in general.
That's true so long as investments are rewarded commensurate with their contribution - but that is rarely the case. What usually happens is that the investors capture the lion's share of the profits, while labor is paid as little as possible.
After all, labor is almost always paid according to the (not remotely free) market, which is to say according to the incremental value of the last employee, or alternately the cost of replacing an employee, rather than according to the actual value provided by the employee.
A similar thing happens with water - water is essential to life, and thus its inherent value is immense. But the market doesn't price it according to its inherent value, but rather at the incremental value of the of the last gallon you buy, at which point (unless its incredibly scarce) you already have plenty to drink and wash with, and more is almost worthless.
Investors are also typically very well protected against any malfeasance on their part (i.e. by the board or executives acting on their behalf), a benefit not offered to employees.
Both are absolutely important - but today we live in a world where investment is treated far preferentially - e.g. capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate than earned income, and investor-driven malfeasance is typically well protected by corporate, LLC, etc. protections, while labor malfeasance is not.
Also, they are not equally important - ask yourself, what the world would look like without major capital investment (e.g. most of human history), versus without labor (e.g. everybody starves).
And where did the money come from to make those investments? People bought products made in previous factories, by previous laborers.
Investments don't create wealth - they capture it. Wealth is generated by the person on the factory floor making something someone will buy, or the person providing a service that someone will buy. Everything else is just a question of how that wealth gets distributed,.
So don't use a device that raises interrupts - do away with the USB bus and access the hardware directly, lots of devices do that. Or limit yourself to an extremely bare-bones interrupt handler - think DOS as the operating system, not Windows. If your total OS is more than a few tens of KB you've added a massive amount of unnecessary vulnerabilities.
Seems like you agree there's a ballot-stuffing risk, so how do you address it? I gave you one example that would be very effective and minimally cumbersome, which you don't like. So what's your solution?
>and no your computer can't simply ignore it: writing simply doesn't work.
Everything I've read says that the restriction is enforced at the driver level for almost all SD card readers - which means a compromised driver or purpose-modified SD card reader will let you ignore it. It *could* be enforced at the card level - but would make the card more expensive, so (almost?) nobody does so - much like including write protect switches on USB flash drives I suppose. Purpose built hardware for elections? I'd love to see it - but suspect most municipalities would opt for the cheaper route.
Yes - while I'm not going to do an in-depth analysis of your sample code, a simple enough format, and a rigorous enough auditing of the code, should make it possible to approach 100% confidence that it's not a potential attack vector.
It has to handle software interrupts, display systems, storage routines, and the like. You also have to have a way to write this complex, graphical software in a manner which is human-maintainable and as little prone to software flaws as possible--and we all know software always has flaws.
Why? You're thinking like a Windows programmer whose grown accustomed to writing code for general-purpose OS. What do you need interrupts for that couldn't be handled with polling? Your system/software storage can be EEPROM, or similarly configured flash, easily accessed via mapping into memory space (many embedded systems do it that way). Your input is trivial - a few buttons or maybe a touch-screen, easy to poll for "current input state", which is all you really need since you're sitting completely idle waiting for an input. And what is this complex, graphical software you're talking about? You're recording ballots, not simulating physics or playing video games. And graphical? You're planning to include photos of the candidates? Otherwise you're just talking text in boxes - easily done with "graphical" text characters. Even with photos you're talking drawing graphical boxes and some crude bitmap loading and blitting for photos and text characters.
It's also why I suggested a two-stage recording process - ballots get tallied, but not committed without official approval. The only votes that can be tampered with are those currently in a "pending" status - and there's no reason they should remain there for more than a few moments - the only purpose is to make sure only one vote is cast, rather than an armful.
This is security theater.
No, it's insurance against ballot stuffing. Without that, if someone manages to post even one extra vote (slips in an extra SD card or whatever), how do you invalidate those votes? Once the ballot is in the box you can't extract it - unless you're storing them as a nice orderly list so that anyone recording voters entering the booth can tell exactly how everybody voted - and there are a lot of good reasons to prefer a secret vote.
We don't need electronic voting to make the system easy to invisibly compromise - we just need a standardized compromise-resistant processes that's easy to publicly verify
Yeah, we've spent a hundred years working on that. It doesn't work.
No, we really haven't. As proved by the fact that we're still dealing with utter lackadaisical chaos around elections, and everyone thinks that's okay. And what makes you think you can make the requisite handling of electronic voting systems by techno-incompentents is going to do any better?
read-only SD card
Do they make those? I've never heard of such a thing - certainly the write protection tab on a normal SD card is only a suggestion that the controlling device is free to ignore. But okay, sure, theoretically you could build a card that is electrically incapable of being written to when locked.
The "few unsupervised moments" you need are between poll open and poll close; and the "vulnerable point" is a long and complex process of entering the ballot box itself, rebooting onto alternate media, switching back to the original media, changing the system image, and bringing the system back to up-and-running. It's maybe a few minutes of downtime if you're heavily prepared. You can, of course, rig the ballot box to display visual and auditory alarm when entered; and if it's logging a heartbeat to the log collector, you'll have to enter the log collector and deploy fake heartbeat events and somehow try to keep those in sync with one-way communicatio
And I'm sure they prefer hiring candidates who, by their selection of email provider, have already shown they're okay with it.
Also, I'm sorry for your bad experiences with overbearing employers - I recommend avoiding working for a corporation, or any business with more than a few dozen employees. Human decency doesn't seem to survive well at those scales.
I'm a programmer, I've got a pretty good idea how software works - and if you say it's not feasible for carefully crafted data to invoke unintended behavior in the data-reading routines and take control of the software, then you have no business even attempting to building such a product. But yes - a sufficiently simple file format with sufficiently robust validation should make that difficult - just make sure your validation tool is at least as robust as your data parsing routine.
>An OS handles inputs and outputs, along with process scheduling.
Process scheduling? What the hell sort of bloated attack-friendly voting system are you trying to create? It's a voting machine - single-threaded single-tasking is completely sufficient for the job. A voting machine only needs to read setup data, display very simple data, recognize very simple inputs, do a bit of tallying, and output the results - again onto a raw device. An arduino could do the job, and if you have more than a few kB worth of system-operating code then you've grossly over-engineered your system and made it radically vulnerable in the process. Hell, there are entire very powerful spreadsheet applications from the DOS days where the entire suite, including a minimal O.S., was only a few hundred KB - there's absolutely no excuse for a voting machine to have more software than that, it just adds more attack surfaces and makes validation *far* more difficult (at a guess, I'd say thorough validation increases geometrically, perhaps even exponentially, with the numbers of lines of code). Oh, and you'd best have the entire source code for the O.S. and voting software public, and verifiable that it does in fact compile to create the image used, or the rest of your security is pointless. After all, the whole point of securing an election is that you can't trust *anyone*
>Whenever you take an action to intervene--if you step in and un-stuff ballots when someone sneaks extra smart cards in--you have a chance to pull some sleight-of-hand and tamper with votes. Prevention preserves integrity.
Absolutely. However, that's no excuse to not report something that does get by your prevention routines somehow. No prevention is 100% perfect, and "we can't fix it" is no excuse for not reporting that it's broken. Worst case scenario if a precinct's vote is compromised you can re-do the vote, or have a PR disaster on your hands. But if you don't even detect or report the compromise, then you've just handed the election to the enemy.
It's also why I suggested a two-stage recording process - ballots get tallied, but not committed without official approval. The only votes that can be tampered with are those currently in a "pending" status - and there's no reason they should remain there for more than a few moments - the only purpose is to make sure only one vote is cast, rather than an armful. The paper-ballot equivalent would be for voters to drop their ballots into a glass box, where an election official has to trigger the bottom to open into the official ballot box. The entire process is visible to everyone, and nobody leaves until they've seen their ballot leave the glass box into the official one. If someone drops in an armload of ballots, they get arrested for election tampering, and the glass box gets opened and shredded, and everyone whose votes hadn't yet been committed votes again.
>Creates bottlenecks and people who leave won't necessarily know their votes were confirmed. You're opening for official intervention, which opens up for tampering.
You don't need much of a bottleneck - people are already monitoring that people aren't obviously voting several times, all they need is a "confirm/cancel button to push - no reason they couldn't push it after each voter leaves the booth - they're just making sure the ballot counter doesn't suddenly go up by 100 when only one person votes. You just tell people "after you've voted, don't leave until you see the counter increase" - along with bright flashing "voter fraud" alarm
What if the your smart card is corrupted in such a manner as to exploit a flaw in your data-reading routines to corrupt the software itself? That's a notoriously vulnerable attack surface right there - we're *still* finding new ways to compromise data loading routines for common formats that are decades old, though you could hopefully simplify the format to . Heck, the smart-card formatting itself could be corrupted, attacking through the OS instead of the voting software. (Though I find it unconscionable that any voting machine would incorporate the huge attack surface of an OS in the first place)
> which the vote count display overhead is supposed to prevent, but then what?
Then you know you have a problem. Just because an acceptable solution isn't readily apparent is no reason to avoid exposing the fact that your system has been compromised. If you want a high-integrity anything, the first responsibility is to do everything you can to ensure that any tampering is revealed. Dealing with it suitably is whole second problem.
Though - here's a possibility: the oversight officials have to push a "commit" button periodically to commit the last N temporarily recorded votes to the permanent record - or a cancel button to invalidate them. So long as that's done while the last N voters are still physically present they can recast their votes while the perpetrator is being arrested. They just need to stick around until they've confirmed their vote is committed.
Really though - why are you trying to do electronic voting at all? What _exactly_ is the point? As far as I can tell it's just a way to radically weaken an important civil institution in order to add some high-tech glitz. Paper ballots are unhackable, easy to use (unless designed deceptively - and that's easy to prevent by requiring them to, for example, be approved by a jury), and there are some extremely clever designs out there that manage to incorporate anonymity, verifiable end-to-end confirmation receipts, and the inability to prove to anyone else how you voted. Heck, mail out ballots beforehand and let people just drop them off for validation and eventual counting - they can take all the time they need, and voting proceeds quickly at the polling pace since all most people need to do is feed it through the validation scanner.
It's *far* easier to secure a physical ballot box, and doesn't take that long to count - especially since the volunteer pool for vote counters is directly proportional to the number of voters - just give everyone a 1% chance of being flagged for vote-counting duty and you could get the votes counted in a few minutes. Ideally votes should be counted at the polling place, immediately after the polls close. Or possibly even in several shifts throughout the day - every hour or two a new ballot box is put out and the old one gets counted - that should still be anonymous enough, and it would be easy to pull randomly flagged people out of line for a half-hour stint in the vote-tallying room next door - let them skip the waiting line for voting so that there's no serious added burden on people so selected. Use a tallying scanner too if you like for added integrity - each bundle of ballots gets counted, tallied by both computer and drafted volunteers, and if the tallies don't all agree, they get re tallied until it does. Heck, tally by computer at the beginning AND end of the process to make sure nothing got modified or misplaced (and potentially later recounted) before the bundle is sealed and labeled with its final tallies, never to be opened again except in case of recount.
Just like that we've solved almost all the existing problems with paper ballots - they're verified as valid when cast (heck, add a digital scale and your wall-count display to ensure nobody casts multiple ballots). You've done the tallying before ballots ever leave the polling place, and can report them to the central counting authority without them ever being unsupervised. Counting is completed shortly after the polls close, and you've not once trusted a computer without verifying its working properly.
How about ""hired an experienced security manager, who is confirming vulnerabilities..."
If you're trying to make the world's first unhackable device, how exactly is such a person not already a primary member of your team?
Do you honestly believe that the problems with social media manipulation wouldn't exist if one of the decentralized, distributed social media platforms had dominated instead? Sure, there's some targeted ads in there that might not exist in a decentralized system, and manipulation of viewership by the central authority, but a whole lot of the problem is state-funded trolls and people's own hatefulness, idiocy, and credulity being amplified by the echo-chamber effect from self-grouping by disconnecting from conflicting views.
As far as I can see, those problems would only be worse if social media were decentralized, as it's very unlikely you could shut someone down even if you knew for certain they were part of a deceitful manipulation campaign - decentralization protects against censorship, for better *and* worse.
Hey, if you don't mind letting google spy on you in exchange for slightly better free email, you probably won't mind your boss spying on you either, right?
And you think doing housework doesn't qualify as "meaningful work that is appreciated by others"? Live somewhere where no one has done house work for a few months and get back to me on that.
The point is, with increasing automation we simply won't have traditional employment opportunities available - period. A small handful of people are all that's needed to run the machines that produce the wealth to sustain everyone (maybe a large double-handful if the work is spread around a lot). The rest will have to find value in work they don't get paid for. Either that or we'll have to create a lot of "makework"employment - public beautification and the like perhaps.
Really? Deprive them of imported fuel, fertilizers, and pesticides, vehicles and other machinery, etc. and I bet you most would have a very rude awakening as to just how self-sufficient they really are. Better off than city dwellers no doubt, but it'd still be mighty bleak and a lot of folks wouldn't make it.
You get an awful lot more people using that road, so the cost per person is far less. Estimates are that it costs an average of ~$1-3million per mile to build a rural paved 2-lane road ($3-5million in the city). Are you and your rural neighbors really paying for all that? I know mine aren't. In Denver you've got 4,000 people per square mile, with an average of 16 blocks per mile, or 32 miles of road per square mile (16 1-mile segments in each direction) - that's only 0.008 miles (14 yards) of road per person. And Denver isn't exactly a pinnacle of population density - New York averages 27,000 people per square mile.
In comparison though, the average population density of metrpopolitan areas in general (heavily biased by more spacious small towns and suburbs) is supposedly only ~280 people per square mile, so over 14 times lower than Denver, and the density of streets probably isn't dramatically larger - you still have blocks about the same size, the yards are just bigger and you have a lot fewer apartment buildings.