It's mostly Kurdish and Afghan refugees that use the tunnel to try and get into Britain. It was a pretty huge issue there last year, when it got to a point that people would regularly be rushing the security gates to try and jump onto the freight trains.
The camp that was set up near the Chunnel, Sangatte, got closed by the French authorities earlier year, as an attempt to placate the English. They Brits contended (pretty accurately) that it was being used as a base for immigration. People would live there by day, and then try and sneak into the UK by night.
I wish I just saved my posts for whenever these electronic voting discussions come up. The system you propose has the same problem that almost all proposed system here have: it's dead easy to buy votes. If you have a receipt that in any way connects you (or the receipt) to who you voted for, you bring back the buying and selling of votes.
Take the above situation. Say you're Mr. Mafia, and you say "I'll give $20 to anyone who votes Nader." So people go and vote Nader, bring their receipt into the Local Business Association (where a minder compares the code to the website listing) and you pick the $20 if it matches - or get your legs broken if it dosen't.
On one hand being able to independently audit your personal vote is something we all like in principle. But any system that lets you do that lets you trivially rig elections.
I'd retype my usual voting suggestion, but I can't be bothered. Check here for my proposed solution. It's not perfect, but it's a decent idea (where you can't buy votes). I know the parsing of barcodes is an issue, so why not change it to some kind of code that's machine readable and easy for humans to parse - maybe a sequence of shapes?
On a slightly different issue, am I the only one that sees an issue with the electing of judges and prosecutors in the US? I have always supported the permajobs of judges - on the grounds that if they have to worry about re-election, then they will be more hesitant to make controversial descisions. The whole point of the judiciary is that it's supposed to be independent of politics (and things like elections). Now, I know it's not - especially here in Canada, where you need to be a big Liberal to get a seat - but giving them jobs for life allows them to ignore politics once they get the seat.
"Germany declares war on Austro-Hungarian Empire declares war on France declares war on Britain declares war on Belgium declares war on Spain declares war on Portugal: Austro-Hungarian Empire nearly declares war on itsef"
I can individually audit my personal vote, and my political party (if it so desires) can demand a recound and audit the physical votes (the receipts). Or change the rules so anyone who has the cash to pay for a recount (to pay for the physical counting process - wages and the like) can request one.
But any system where the public can independently associate me with my vote (as with the parent to which I replied) is open to abuse.
This is what I love about these electronic voting discussions - people always come up with these solutions, and then ignore the fundamental principle of designing voting machines: it must not be possible, under any circumstances, for an outsider to verify your vote independently. Now, that sentence is worded poorly, so I'll give an example of the problem with this proposed system:
1. CREEP announces that they'll give $200 to anyone who votes for person X 2. Joe Public says "OK, I'm in" 3. Joe Public votes for X and remembers his PIN number 4. Joe Public goes to the local CREEP office and tells them their PIN, their VRN, and who they voted for 5. CREEP, using the freely-available hash function, creates their hash using the supplied information 6. CREEP then checks the list and sees if the vote was recorded 7. If yes, $200
Now replace "CREEP" above with "The Mafia" and "$200" with "the life of your family." Now you see the problem.
My proposed solution has always been the following:
-Vote on a computer (with a well-designed interface), which records votes and prints out a receipt with the name of the candidate and a simplified 2D barcode on it. -Have a poster on the wall inside the boot saying "if you voted for X, your barcode should look like this" -Deposit the recipt in the ballot box on the way out, as usual.
This allows us three counts: the machine, the barcodes, and the names. Any political party can request a count based on the barcodes, and if it's close they can get one based on the names on the ballots. As far as I can tell, this system is - at worst - no more prone to fraud than the current paper-based one. And you can't buy votes, since no personally-identifiable information is stored on the receipts (which voters can't keep anyways).
There's probably a logic gap in my solution: any suggestions?
AFAIK, Meir Kahane's been on the State Deptartement's list of terrorists for a few years now, since even before the War On Terror started. Him and his boys are the Israeli equivalent of the Black Panthers - extremist militants who happen to get a kick out of killing Muslims, and manage to see the whole world as a Muslim conspiracy against the pious Jews.
Regardless of which side the US Governent is one, Kahane is the kind of group that would be blocked.
Over the past few years I've seen two principal strategies to deal with cheating prevail in my Comp.Eng program
1. Accept it. In most classes where there were paper-based assignments (think Math, Physics, etc.) our profs would basically say on the first day of class "I know you're all going to work together on these assignments. Fine. But remember that exams arn't done in groups." and would then point out the fact that assignments were only worth ~10%. Thus, we all learned the best way to work as a team, got everything done, and had good sets of notes for the final. Also had the bonus of having to explain each solution to your friends, so you knew much of it inside out by the time exams came.
2. Expect it. At the start of the semester the prof would announce "I don't care where you get your answers from, as long as you cite and reference them." (mainly for programming and design clases). He'd then give us a list of decent sources for programming information/examples. But then all the questions he'd set would be different enough that you could only copy-and-paste parts of the code most often found. Thus, you learn to see what's been done in the past and not to reinvent the wheel, while at the same time having to work with and understand a stranger's code. Which is exactly what working with any downloaded code (think SDKs) is.
Whatever you do, accept that people will work together/cheat. Just find a way to make it not that important.
Differing colors is of my favourite features of most currency systems. I love thatI can open my wallet and quickly glance at the ratio of blue to purple to green that's in there, and decide if I have enough money to go out or if I need to stop by the bank.
It's also much easier to pay with the righ denomination of bill. Several times in the States I've ended up paying for a four dolla item with a twenty, because that's what I took out.
My favourite, actually, is the UK/EU system of differing sizes, with size increasing as a function of value. UK twenties and fifties are pretty damn big, but they're also worth roughly C$55 and C$120 - some significant cash for a single bill. Yes, your wallet looks kinda different in side, but it's damn easy to quickly pull out a fiver for a pint.
Get a metropass (that's what they're called here) and take the bus/streetcar. Or if you're afraid of that, find a few people who live near you (I'm guessing you live in a suburban subdivision) who need to get into town in a similar timeframe, and get a carpool to the station going.
Why will running a BSD/Mac/Linux/BeOS/whatever box bypass this?
If they pinpoint scans based on volumes, then P2P programs running NetBSD don't consume any more/less bandwidth than Windows ones.
If they portscan, what stops them from portscanning your Debian system?
If they disable your jack, I don't care what OS you're running, you got nothing.
And if the point you were making was that people who run non-Windows systems don't run any P2P apps, then just say so, and don't pander to the "I hate Windows" crowd.
I'm curious - all articles on Icarus seem to mention that it's an open-source piece of software, and yet they're quoted as saying that they hope to keep the internal workings of the thing a secret so "hackers" don't figure out how it works. How do these two corrolate with each other? If it's really OS, then show us the source (under whatever license they so choose) and rely on the stregth of Icarus' logic to preserve the integrity of the system . If it's not OS, then stop marketing it as if it is.
I can't say that being tracked by my Tube pass really scares me. Pretty much anywhere in London you can look up and smile at a video camera. If I'm already being watched by a few hundred cameras a day and having my movements tracked by my cell phone, I'll take one more form of tracking if it means I don't have to wait in line as much.
If you want privacy in London, get out of London. If you can deal with six ways of being tracked (as opposed to teh current five), then these seem fine.
At least Chuck is a real user, unlike last time (I don't remember the exact story) where no one could find any record of the user in the database and his domain belonged to an advertising company.
I'm not sure I see the benefit of this. One of the key elements of out voting system is the "secret ballot" - the idea that who you vote for remains a secret, and that no one can find it out (not even you). The principle behind this is both to allow personal choice, and to eliminate vote buying. If we got a receipt that said our names and who we voted for (with a hash so we can check it's in the computer), it would open an entire industry of vote-buying. Agents would openly say "sign here to say that you'll vote for Joe, and then come back after the election and give me your receipt and I'll give you a hundred bucks." This would make our political system more corrupt than it is now. Without any proof of who you voted for (as we have now), vote-buying isn't practical, as it's so open to fraud.
If you advocate a receipt with a just a hash, so that you can check your name against the list of people who votes, I ask what the point is. Your hash may show up on a screen on a list, but how do you know that that hash was counted into the right vote collection? May as well save the paper and not do receipts, and just trust the government (as you'd have to anyways).
For my money, I think we should have a combination manual-electronic voting system. Use any of the current e-voting systems (or invent a new one) and use them for the counts, but modify them so that they also print a receipt with the candidate selected's name (in both man- and machine-readable form), and have posters in the booth that allow the voters to confirm the machine-readable portions (ie. a poster that says "If you voted for Jack, your vote should look like this". If any race is within X%, it would trigger an automatic recount using the machine-readable portions of the receipts, witnessed by people from all parties. If anyone wants to challenge that, let them do another recount using the man-readable portions of the receipts.
This system gives us a quick count, a papertrail backup and semi-quick second count if need be, and a slow but verifyable third count in really extreme cases.
Yeah UCC...Home of both the smartest and stupiest High School kids I've ever seen (yes, I went there too). Dave was brilliant, and when around fellow computer people, quite sociable - I had meetings in the room next to the computer club, and would drop in when I was waiting for them to start. Put him in a room full of non-geeks, and it was a different story. But wasn't that a fair number of us then?
Anyways, I remember seeing the game he wrote and being blown away by it. Granted, it wasn't the most amazing thing, but when you consider that he had to use BGI (the Borland built-in graphics systems) for everything, it was quite a feat. Especially compared to some of the other projects that came out of that class (Slemon's DSC 110).
He was a nice enough guy, and he definatley deserved this. Well donne, Dave.
I noticed it too - and if you look at several other stories posted today, many of them have it. The one about the PPC970 has an AMD logo on top of an IBM logo. The PC/104 one has hardware on top of links. "Video Game Movies in Development" has the 'Games' joystick on top of the 'Movies' clapboard.
The winner, hovever, seems to be this one about the GPL vs. the XP licence: it has Tux on top of Bill of Borg, both above the Justice lady. Hrm...
I'm guessing you're one of the much smaller percentage of people who don't use Windows and the built-in browsser, IE. Sice that seems to be the case, I'll let you in on a little secret: IE already has a search function built-in to the nav bar. There's a large button next to the "Favourites" button that says "Search." And guess where it defaults to searching from? That's right, MSN Search. And it dosen't let you change that to Google, even now. FYI...
In many ways, I see this as a good thing. If MS wants to build a better search engine with a "better product and a better user experience", more power to them. They can't do anything to make me stop using Google, so why should I be worried if they see Google as a competitor?
Should MS, by some miracle, come up with a better search engine and a better interface, then I'll use it because it's the best for me. If they come up with a new feature that I like, I'll use it. I don't really care who's engine it is, so long as it finds the results I'm looking for. If it sucks (as I suspect it will), then that's a few million dollars less for Bill and Steve. Either way, we the users win.
Competition at work: may the best search engine win.
As much as I love them, this is is one of those cases where they can't tell if they're coming or going. Maybe they'll write an Amicus Curae for both sides, and confuse the shit out of the judge.
And for the record, I sent in my annual EFF cheque last month:P
Active a wicked place. Whenever I go in there, I always come out with exactly what I need, as well as a few things I don't. C64 games. Circuit components galore. And a NES headset with integrated light gun, primitive heads-up screen, and voice command to fire. Bought that beauty for about five bucks, and saw it later in a video store for fifty as an antique.
As the Parent said, who knows if they have an online presence. Frankly, I hope (and have a feeling) they don't - if you only go to that place to buy certain items (without an open mind about what else is there) you're missing most of the fun of the place.
Kinda funny that the woman introducing a bill to greatly restrict the power of the DMCA was named "Cyber Champion" by the BSA...three cheers for biting the hand that feeds you!
Slashdot Mirror
It's mostly Kurdish and Afghan refugees that use the tunnel to try and get into Britain. It was a pretty huge issue there last year, when it got to a point that people would regularly be rushing the security gates to try and jump onto the freight trains.
The camp that was set up near the Chunnel, Sangatte, got closed by the French authorities earlier year, as an attempt to placate the English. They Brits contended (pretty accurately) that it was being used as a base for immigration. People would live there by day, and then try and sneak into the UK by night.
Erm...are you perchance talking about France's TGV - the "Train a Grande Vitesse" (lit. Train with High Velocity)?
I wish I just saved my posts for whenever these electronic voting discussions come up. The system you propose has the same problem that almost all proposed system here have: it's dead easy to buy votes. If you have a receipt that in any way connects you (or the receipt) to who you voted for, you bring back the buying and selling of votes.
Take the above situation. Say you're Mr. Mafia, and you say "I'll give $20 to anyone who votes Nader." So people go and vote Nader, bring their receipt into the Local Business Association (where a minder compares the code to the website listing) and you pick the $20 if it matches - or get your legs broken if it dosen't.
On one hand being able to independently audit your personal vote is something we all like in principle. But any system that lets you do that lets you trivially rig elections.
I'd retype my usual voting suggestion, but I can't be bothered. Check here for my proposed solution. It's not perfect, but it's a decent idea (where you can't buy votes). I know the parsing of barcodes is an issue, so why not change it to some kind of code that's machine readable and easy for humans to parse - maybe a sequence of shapes?
On a slightly different issue, am I the only one that sees an issue with the electing of judges and prosecutors in the US? I have always supported the permajobs of judges - on the grounds that if they have to worry about re-election, then they will be more hesitant to make controversial descisions. The whole point of the judiciary is that it's supposed to be independent of politics (and things like elections). Now, I know it's not - especially here in Canada, where you need to be a big Liberal to get a seat - but giving them jobs for life allows them to ignore politics once they get the seat.
Been up for about a minute and we're already getting everyone's favourite error:
/usr/www/users/smkenney/moc.php on line 31
Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in
Enough said. I have yet to meet math that I need to do that, after suitable prodding, my TI-89 has been unable to calculate for me.
Anyone remember the artice about WWII?
"Germany declares war on Austro-Hungarian Empire declares war on France declares war on Britain declares war on Belgium declares war on Spain declares war on Portugal: Austro-Hungarian Empire nearly declares war on itsef"
You're right.
And that's the whole idea.
I can individually audit my personal vote, and my political party (if it so desires) can demand a recound and audit the physical votes (the receipts). Or change the rules so anyone who has the cash to pay for a recount (to pay for the physical counting process - wages and the like) can request one.
But any system where the public can independently associate me with my vote (as with the parent to which I replied) is open to abuse.
This is what I love about these electronic voting discussions - people always come up with these solutions, and then ignore the fundamental principle of designing voting machines: it must not be possible, under any circumstances, for an outsider to verify your vote independently. Now, that sentence is worded poorly, so I'll give an example of the problem with this proposed system:
1. CREEP announces that they'll give $200 to anyone who votes for person X
2. Joe Public says "OK, I'm in"
3. Joe Public votes for X and remembers his PIN number
4. Joe Public goes to the local CREEP office and tells them their PIN, their VRN, and who they voted for
5. CREEP, using the freely-available hash function, creates their hash using the supplied information
6. CREEP then checks the list and sees if the vote was recorded
7. If yes, $200
Now replace "CREEP" above with "The Mafia" and "$200" with "the life of your family." Now you see the problem.
My proposed solution has always been the following:
-Vote on a computer (with a well-designed interface), which records votes and prints out a receipt with the name of the candidate and a simplified 2D barcode on it.
-Have a poster on the wall inside the boot saying "if you voted for X, your barcode should look like this"
-Deposit the recipt in the ballot box on the way out, as usual.
This allows us three counts: the machine, the barcodes, and the names. Any political party can request a count based on the barcodes, and if it's close they can get one based on the names on the ballots. As far as I can tell, this system is - at worst - no more prone to fraud than the current paper-based one. And you can't buy votes, since no personally-identifiable information is stored on the receipts (which voters can't keep anyways).
There's probably a logic gap in my solution: any suggestions?
AFAIK, Meir Kahane's been on the State Deptartement's list of terrorists for a few years now, since even before the War On Terror started. Him and his boys are the Israeli equivalent of the Black Panthers - extremist militants who happen to get a kick out of killing Muslims, and manage to see the whole world as a Muslim conspiracy against the pious Jews.
Regardless of which side the US Governent is one, Kahane is the kind of group that would be blocked.
Over the past few years I've seen two principal strategies to deal with cheating prevail in my Comp.Eng program
1. Accept it. In most classes where there were paper-based assignments (think Math, Physics, etc.) our profs would basically say on the first day of class "I know you're all going to work together on these assignments. Fine. But remember that exams arn't done in groups." and would then point out the fact that assignments were only worth ~10%. Thus, we all learned the best way to work as a team, got everything done, and had good sets of notes for the final. Also had the bonus of having to explain each solution to your friends, so you knew much of it inside out by the time exams came.
2. Expect it. At the start of the semester the prof would announce "I don't care where you get your answers from, as long as you cite and reference them." (mainly for programming and design clases). He'd then give us a list of decent sources for programming information/examples. But then all the questions he'd set would be different enough that you could only copy-and-paste parts of the code most often found. Thus, you learn to see what's been done in the past and not to reinvent the wheel, while at the same time having to work with and understand a stranger's code. Which is exactly what working with any downloaded code (think SDKs) is.
Whatever you do, accept that people will work together/cheat. Just find a way to make it not that important.
Differing colors is of my favourite features of most currency systems. I love thatI can open my wallet and quickly glance at the ratio of blue to purple to green that's in there, and decide if I have enough money to go out or if I need to stop by the bank.
It's also much easier to pay with the righ denomination of bill. Several times in the States I've ended up paying for a four dolla item with a twenty, because that's what I took out.
My favourite, actually, is the UK/EU system of differing sizes, with size increasing as a function of value. UK twenties and fifties are pretty damn big, but they're also worth roughly C$55 and C$120 - some significant cash for a single bill. Yes, your wallet looks kinda different in side, but it's damn easy to quickly pull out a fiver for a pint.
Get a metropass (that's what they're called here) and take the bus/streetcar. Or if you're afraid of that, find a few people who live near you (I'm guessing you live in a suburban subdivision) who need to get into town in a similar timeframe, and get a carpool to the station going.
Why will running a BSD/Mac/Linux/BeOS/whatever box bypass this?
If they pinpoint scans based on volumes, then P2P programs running NetBSD don't consume any more/less bandwidth than Windows ones.
If they portscan, what stops them from portscanning your Debian system?
If they disable your jack, I don't care what OS you're running, you got nothing.
And if the point you were making was that people who run non-Windows systems don't run any P2P apps, then just say so, and don't pander to the "I hate Windows" crowd.
I'm curious - all articles on Icarus seem to mention that it's an open-source piece of software, and yet they're quoted as saying that they hope to keep the internal workings of the thing a secret so "hackers" don't figure out how it works. How do these two corrolate with each other? If it's really OS, then show us the source (under whatever license they so choose) and rely on the stregth of Icarus' logic to preserve the integrity of the system . If it's not OS, then stop marketing it as if it is.
I can't say that being tracked by my Tube pass really scares me. Pretty much anywhere in London you can look up and smile at a video camera. If I'm already being watched by a few hundred cameras a day and having my movements tracked by my cell phone, I'll take one more form of tracking if it means I don't have to wait in line as much.
If you want privacy in London, get out of London. If you can deal with six ways of being tracked (as opposed to teh current five), then these seem fine.
At least Chuck is a real user, unlike last time (I don't remember the exact story) where no one could find any record of the user in the database and his domain belonged to an advertising company.
I'm not sure I see the benefit of this. One of the key elements of out voting system is the "secret ballot" - the idea that who you vote for remains a secret, and that no one can find it out (not even you). The principle behind this is both to allow personal choice, and to eliminate vote buying. If we got a receipt that said our names and who we voted for (with a hash so we can check it's in the computer), it would open an entire industry of vote-buying. Agents would openly say "sign here to say that you'll vote for Joe, and then come back after the election and give me your receipt and I'll give you a hundred bucks." This would make our political system more corrupt than it is now. Without any proof of who you voted for (as we have now), vote-buying isn't practical, as it's so open to fraud.
If you advocate a receipt with a just a hash, so that you can check your name against the list of people who votes, I ask what the point is. Your hash may show up on a screen on a list, but how do you know that that hash was counted into the right vote collection? May as well save the paper and not do receipts, and just trust the government (as you'd have to anyways).
For my money, I think we should have a combination manual-electronic voting system. Use any of the current e-voting systems (or invent a new one) and use them for the counts, but modify them so that they also print a receipt with the candidate selected's name (in both man- and machine-readable form), and have posters in the booth that allow the voters to confirm the machine-readable portions (ie. a poster that says "If you voted for Jack, your vote should look like this". If any race is within X%, it would trigger an automatic recount using the machine-readable portions of the receipts, witnessed by people from all parties. If anyone wants to challenge that, let them do another recount using the man-readable portions of the receipts.
This system gives us a quick count, a papertrail backup and semi-quick second count if need be, and a slow but verifyable third count in really extreme cases.
Yeah UCC...Home of both the smartest and stupiest High School kids I've ever seen (yes, I went there too). Dave was brilliant, and when around fellow computer people, quite sociable - I had meetings in the room next to the computer club, and would drop in when I was waiting for them to start. Put him in a room full of non-geeks, and it was a different story. But wasn't that a fair number of us then?
Anyways, I remember seeing the game he wrote and being blown away by it. Granted, it wasn't the most amazing thing, but when you consider that he had to use BGI (the Borland built-in graphics systems) for everything, it was quite a feat. Especially compared to some of the other projects that came out of that class (Slemon's DSC 110).
He was a nice enough guy, and he definatley deserved this. Well donne, Dave.
I noticed it too - and if you look at several other stories posted today, many of them have it. The one about the PPC970 has an AMD logo on top of an IBM logo. The PC/104 one has hardware on top of links. "Video Game Movies in Development" has the 'Games' joystick on top of the 'Movies' clapboard.
The winner, hovever, seems to be this one about the GPL vs. the XP licence: it has Tux on top of Bill of Borg, both above the Justice lady. Hrm...
I'm guessing you're one of the much smaller percentage of people who don't use Windows and the built-in browsser, IE. Sice that seems to be the case, I'll let you in on a little secret: IE already has a search function built-in to the nav bar. There's a large button next to the "Favourites" button that says "Search." And guess where it defaults to searching from? That's right, MSN Search. And it dosen't let you change that to Google, even now. FYI...
In many ways, I see this as a good thing. If MS wants to build a better search engine with a "better product and a better user experience", more power to them. They can't do anything to make me stop using Google, so why should I be worried if they see Google as a competitor?
Should MS, by some miracle, come up with a better search engine and a better interface, then I'll use it because it's the best for me. If they come up with a new feature that I like, I'll use it. I don't really care who's engine it is, so long as it finds the results I'm looking for. If it sucks (as I suspect it will), then that's a few million dollars less for Bill and Steve. Either way, we the users win.
Competition at work: may the best search engine win.
AFAIK Google sends all their DMCA notes to Chilling Effects (example here) and places a note on all links they remove that this is done.
As much as I love them, this is is one of those cases where they can't tell if they're coming or going. Maybe they'll write an Amicus Curae for both sides, and confuse the shit out of the judge.
:P
And for the record, I sent in my annual EFF cheque last month
Active a wicked place. Whenever I go in there, I always come out with exactly what I need, as well as a few things I don't. C64 games. Circuit components galore. And a NES headset with integrated light gun, primitive heads-up screen, and voice command to fire. Bought that beauty for about five bucks, and saw it later in a video store for fifty as an antique.
As the Parent said, who knows if they have an online presence. Frankly, I hope (and have a feeling) they don't - if you only go to that place to buy certain items (without an open mind about what else is there) you're missing most of the fun of the place.
Kinda funny that the woman introducing a bill to greatly restrict the power of the DMCA was named "Cyber Champion" by the BSA...three cheers for biting the hand that feeds you!