The real issue is that a serious attempt is being made to provide a "clean" internet feed--despite the overwhelming technical issues that implies. A blacklist is one thing (and, yes, trivial to implement). This isn't what the government is proposing though. They are proposing some kind of algorithm that will detect dodgy content on the fly. That means that every bit and byte and packet passing through Australin ISPs will get routed through the censoring algorithm.
Thing is that this isn't a "serious attempt" in the real world. There's also the fundermental issue that anyone who could create an AI capable of doing this would have better things to do with their time. As would the AI itself...
And distracting people from the real issue - censorship is wrong - is just going to encourage them to solve the technical issues. I'd rather have a broken solution that will get thrown out in the first few months of use than an efficient solution that will actually succeed.
An effective solution isn't really possible. However even a badly broken system is unlikely to get thrown out in so short a time period. Political backing would tend to turn it into the kind of financial black hole which suck up money in the name of "fixing it".
The purpose of this filtering is not to keep child porn away from pedophiles. It's not to keep hard-core porn away from people who wanna whack off. The purpose is to stop Mum and Dad and the kids from stumbling upon this stuff.
I very much doubt it is possible to "stumble upon" child porn. As for regular porn this is far more likely to be an issue with email spam. AFAIK this idea is about http(s) however.
Filtering websites with this material is easy. You just force the ISPs to blacklist certain addresses from their DNS, and hire some puritans to maintain the blacklist.
This will probably give you a blacklist suitable for other puritans. It probably won't be right for other people of a prudish nature, even other Christian groups. Different people have different ideas about what is and isn't offensive. At least part of the issue here is that the Australian government may be going for the union rather than the intersection of what various lobby groups (who may not be that representative of the Australian public in the first place).
I for one would prefer advanced fighter jet technology (i.e. F-22) to stay IN the united states and out of China, Russia, Israel, Iran...etc.
Russia and China are perfectly capable of producing advanced fighter aircraft. However they are not going to do so unless they actually need such aircraft. Israel is most likely exempt from the restrictions, even if they wern't there are so many highly trusted Israelis within the US that Israel probably knows everything there is to know about one. Which only leaves Iran...
Arms control and technology export control are different issues. Arms control is intended to make it harder for people we don't like to get firepower in bulk. It's not about the underlying technology; it's about production. Most of the cases mentioned are pure arms control issues.
There's also the issue of stopping people you might be planning on attacking soon getting hold of the weapons you might be using so they can't develop countermeasures. e.g. Iran might be far more interested in countering than cloning US weapons. Especially those of types not being used in Iraq.
There's two things we're talking about in this situation. The first is advanced military technology. Most other countries do not have these things, if only because their military R&D budgets are smaller.
Or possibly because most countries use their military to protect themselves rather than to invade other countries (on the other side of the planet).
The other thing is regular small arms. Nobody is saying that you can't get those things elsewhere, but that America shouldn't necessarily export those anywhere in any quantity. To, you know, stop random warlords or organized crime from being able to acquire military equipment in large supply.
Except that these kind of people don't appear to have too much of a problem aquiring weapons in the first place.
Isn't it more than a bit arrogant and unrealistic to think the US is the only country with these technologies?
IIRC US export controls apply to things developed outside of the US and previously imported. It's even possible that they could apply to a re-export to wherever the whatever was originally invented... It's also daft for any country to think that if they can't stop weapons, drugs and people entering that country illegally they can do much about information leaving it.
But it's not transparent. The counting is not public. The machine is a black box. Sure, it gets certified by an accredited agency - but they only test a sample, not every machine that gets used. In the end, you can only hope that your vote gets counted by a "properly configured" machine, without any possibility to verify the result. (Unless you have a paper trail machine. Which again would have to be counted manually, defeating the purpose of the machine in the first place.)
Then you have a machine which prints filled in ballot papers. Not only is this considerably more expensive than using a regular printing press it also means that your polling place needs a suitable electricity supply and someone able maintain the machine if it malfunctions or simply runs out of consumables. There's also the problem of how do you know each ballot actually corresponds to a voter? Someone could have programmed it it "ballot stuff" in various subtle ways.
Voting machines are very expensive, not least because of all the auditing and certification that comes along with them. They need to be supported and maintained as well.
Which is also going to need lots of auditing and certification. Or at least it should. Having a machine which needs to work perfectly very infrequently is also a major engineering challenge.
And even with e-Voting, some ballots will have to be printed for absentee voters, so the initial printing cost is there anyway.
Often the expensive part of printing is setting the press up in the first place. Since it needs a skilled person to do this, once running it may well be able to do things such as binding and boxing without any further human action.
This isn't actually the case. Not only are there plenty of examples, even from recent history. of elections which are effectivly for show it isn't even necessary to have elections to have a democratic form of government. The system used in Classical Athens was arguably more democratic than the kind of systems we have today. (Which appear to owe their origins more to the Romans). The Atheneans even make use of machines, but instead of being for conducting elections these were used to randomly select citizens on a daily basis.
Paper ballots have to be counted by people. Lots of people. People are error-prone. And people could have agendas.
There is a simple way to address this. That is to have scrutineers. These people most definitly do have agendas, the agenda of a candidate scrutineer is to ensure that their candidate didn't lose due to either error or conspiracy.
Even if the risk that 1 person is making a mistake is 0.005% the risk is increased a if you have 5000 people counting votes. (It's not linear, but I can't remember enough of the statistics course to tell).
These mistakes are likely to be random. Using scrutineers is going to reduce the error rate by orders of magnitude. But it also makes conspiracy very unlikely, who ever heard of a conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people.
This is the reason you want machines to do the counting. It's what computers do best. At least properly configured.
A badly configured one may well have a non random error distribution. There are many problems with using machines. One is that it's considerably more difficult to scrutineer the process, to the point of being practically impossible once micro-electronics perform any significent role. Another problem is that you reduce the number of people involved, thus making conspiracy more possible.
Besides which it isn't so much a matter of figuring out what the voter wanted as figuring out whether they cast a vote which satisfies the formal legal requirements. This means (for simplicity I'll restrict this to lower house elections) that the voter numbered all squares next to the candidates names in a sequential order. If a voter puts a cross or a tick in the box, or leaves a number out of any of the boxes, etc that vote of course spoilt and must be discarded. Bear in mind we have exhaustive preferential voting. That is why I pointed to our exhaustive preferential system as a probable cause of the greater informality rate.
There is also the issue that there are many situations where filling in the ballot paper according to the rules does not reflect what they want to happen. Thus they can either break the rules and risk having their ballot ignored (once there are more than a certain proportion of "spoilt ballots" someone is going to look at "bending" said rules) or follow the rules with the risk of voting for someone they don't want to. Using a machine is likely to mean that only the latter is possible.
I've often wondered about that. I could see it if there are parallel elections happening at the same time. ie, vote for the president, vote for the governor, vote for the mayor, vote for the sheriff, vote for the dog-catcher, etc.
Something which only happens in one country.
But if it is a single election, there really is no need for anything fancier than a pencil and paper ballot system.
Even with parallel elections can can either count in parallel (assuming you have physically separate ballots) or serially (starting with the "most important" election first). Even if the US where there might be lots of parallel elections going on (with multiple elections on the same ballot paper preventing parallel counting) there is typically a huge amount of time to count.
How hard would it be to add an option "spoil vote".
Except that it wouldn't be one option it would be many options. Quite possibly where N! (with N being the number of candidates) was part of the formula for how many "spoil vote" options you'd need.
I didn't vote last weekend, but from the MOJ's Flash demo it seems that there is a button labeled "Äänestän tyhjää" ("I'm casting an empty vote") on the front page of this particular system.
Presuably an "empty vote" would be "I don't care", which not the same as "I want none of the listed candidates". With something like STV it's preferectly possible for a voter's position to be "My prefered candidate is B, If I can't have B then C, but I don't want to vote for any of the other candidates at all" or "I defintly don't want to vote for candidate A"... Very often the people designing ballots do not account for every possible voter choice. Whilst a voter can apply a "patch" with a paper ballot they cannot do so with a machine. Note there have been elections where a significent number of voters have done something unexpected (even "against the rules"). e.g. indicated that the same candidate is both their first and second preference for a position.
I keep hearing this argument about evoting, that it has a lower failure rate. Can someone please find an actual study that confirms this? Or are they just hoping if something's repeated often enough it's taken as fact?
Even in theory this is questionable since a complex electronic system has many more possible failure modes than pieces of paper marked with a simple writing tool and collated by closely watched people.
Actually ministry of justice itself described 2% failure rate as "very high" compared to ordinary paper ballot. In Finland an ordinary failure rate for paper ballots cast would afaik be around 0,5% and that includes Donald Duck and offensive drawings, which are not available to evoters.
These are not "failures" indeed a system which cannot allow a voter to create a ""spoilt ballot" in a way which is clearly delibrate should itself be considered broken by design. A big problem with "evoting" is that it can apply rules against a voter's intent e.g. preventing them from using an ommited "none of the above"; indicating with an STV system that they don't want some of the candidates under any circumstances; etc.
While we might argue about the specifics (searching laptops, etc.), hardly anyone has a problem with this. What the ACLU and most clear-headed people disagree with is the idea that this includes any area within 100 miles of the border. That's hardly "the nearest available transit points."
It also depends exactly how you define "the border". There'd probably be even more orange on the map if it were also to count every diplomatic mission and every airport as "border".
At least in this case, since the evidence came from a supposed good samaritan delivering the drive, it is unlikely the police have access to download logs or any useful ability to tap the guy's network connection. It was too late by the time they got the drive.
It's also far too late to know if the "evidence" has been tampered with. Even if the "good samaritan" is exactly what they appear to be a person with motive to harm the accused has had access to the machine.
(We won't even talk about the whole question of whether evidence obtained through a third-party seizure and delivered by a fourth party has any real validity, nor the question of whether the property was property seized by the landlord in the first place.)
We have no way of knowing who has done what with the machine. Even if the police were to follow the rules to the letter any so called "evidence" has already been tainted.
The biggest issues I see with going 4th amendment rights on this is the fact that the defendant doesn't own the computer anymore. From the article he lost it because of problems not paying rent. It changed hands to an uninvolved third party who noticed the files were on, now his, computer.
It's also impossible to prove that anything found on the computer is anything to do with the defendant. The rent dispute is an obvious motive for the former landlord to take all sorts of malicious actions.
Here's a clue: be upset with the stupid officers that could've followed procedure and actually nabbed the guy instead of being lazy and screwing up the case instead of the judge for enforcing the law.
The chances of a md5 collision are more remote than the chances that someone else's DNA at a crime scene will match yours. Want to see for yourself? Get a calculator and do 36^32 and that's the number of different hashes you can get.
DNA certainly isn't random nor is there any reason to assume that MD5's of photographs are.
While he was still in court, a freshman in the school also hacked into the network. This time the file may have leaked, meaning that about 10,000 social security numbers (mine included) could have been released.
Why were they storing these in the first place? It fairly commonly happens that where there is a large data breach the reasons for storing most (even all) of the data were weak to non existant.
Any machine built for this purpose should at the very least be inspected (including code and all other pratical aspects) by an independant non-political technical review board.
How do you do you propose to do this in a way which is both useful and non destructive? Solid state microelectronics tends to require such steps as dunking in liquid nitrogen and using an electron microscope.
As a practical matter, nobody is 100% honorable, and somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
The latter is probably quite close to the truth. In the US there just dosn't appear to be any tradition of the people running the election being independent of the candidates.
More importantly, we should switch to a form of voting in which a single company is not in a position to completely screw up the entire election.
That isn't actually too difficult. You simply make the electoral process as low tech and transparent as possible.
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The real issue is that a serious attempt is being made to provide a "clean" internet feed--despite the overwhelming technical issues that implies. A blacklist is one thing (and, yes, trivial to implement). This isn't what the government is proposing though. They are proposing some kind of algorithm that will detect dodgy content on the fly. That means that every bit and byte and packet passing through Australin ISPs will get routed through the censoring algorithm.
Thing is that this isn't a "serious attempt" in the real world. There's also the fundermental issue that anyone who could create an AI capable of doing this would have better things to do with their time. As would the AI itself...
And distracting people from the real issue - censorship is wrong - is just going to encourage them to solve the technical issues. I'd rather have a broken solution that will get thrown out in the first few months of use than an efficient solution that will actually succeed.
An effective solution isn't really possible. However even a badly broken system is unlikely to get thrown out in so short a time period. Political backing would tend to turn it into the kind of financial black hole which suck up money in the name of "fixing it".
The purpose of this filtering is not to keep child porn away from pedophiles. It's not to keep hard-core porn away from people who wanna whack off. The purpose is to stop Mum and Dad and the kids from stumbling upon this stuff.
I very much doubt it is possible to "stumble upon" child porn. As for regular porn this is far more likely to be an issue with email spam. AFAIK this idea is about http(s) however.
Filtering websites with this material is easy. You just force the ISPs to blacklist certain addresses from their DNS, and hire some puritans to maintain the blacklist.
This will probably give you a blacklist suitable for other puritans. It probably won't be right for other people of a prudish nature, even other Christian groups. Different people have different ideas about what is and isn't offensive. At least part of the issue here is that the Australian government may be going for the union rather than the intersection of what various lobby groups (who may not be that representative of the Australian public in the first place).
I for one would prefer advanced fighter jet technology (i.e. F-22) to stay IN the united states and out of China, Russia, Israel, Iran...etc.
Russia and China are perfectly capable of producing advanced fighter aircraft. However they are not going to do so unless they actually need such aircraft. Israel is most likely exempt from the restrictions, even if they wern't there are so many highly trusted Israelis within the US that Israel probably knows everything there is to know about one.
Which only leaves Iran...
Arms control and technology export control are different issues. Arms control is intended to make it harder for people we don't like to get firepower in bulk. It's not about the underlying technology; it's about production. Most of the cases mentioned are pure arms control issues.
There's also the issue of stopping people you might be planning on attacking soon getting hold of the weapons you might be using so they can't develop countermeasures. e.g. Iran might be far more interested in countering than cloning US weapons. Especially those of types not being used in Iraq.
There's two things we're talking about in this situation. The first is advanced military technology. Most other countries do not have these things, if only because their military R&D budgets are smaller.
Or possibly because most countries use their military to protect themselves rather than to invade other countries (on the other side of the planet).
The other thing is regular small arms. Nobody is saying that you can't get those things elsewhere, but that America shouldn't necessarily export those anywhere in any quantity. To, you know, stop random warlords or organized crime from being able to acquire military equipment in large supply.
Except that these kind of people don't appear to have too much of a problem aquiring weapons in the first place.
Isn't it more than a bit arrogant and unrealistic to think the US is the only country with these technologies?
IIRC US export controls apply to things developed outside of the US and previously imported. It's even possible that they could apply to a re-export to wherever the whatever was originally invented...
It's also daft for any country to think that if they can't stop weapons, drugs and people entering that country illegally they can do much about information leaving it.
But it's not transparent. The counting is not public. The machine is a black box. Sure, it gets certified by an accredited agency - but they only test a sample, not every machine that gets used. In the end, you can only hope that your vote gets counted by a "properly configured" machine, without any possibility to verify the result. (Unless you have a paper trail machine. Which again would have to be counted manually, defeating the purpose of the machine in the first place.)
Then you have a machine which prints filled in ballot papers. Not only is this considerably more expensive than using a regular printing press it also means that your polling place needs a suitable electricity supply and someone able maintain the machine if it malfunctions or simply runs out of consumables. There's also the problem of how do you know each ballot actually corresponds to a voter? Someone could have programmed it it "ballot stuff" in various subtle ways.
Voting machines are very expensive, not least because of all the auditing and certification that comes along with them. They need to be supported and maintained as well.
Which is also going to need lots of auditing and certification. Or at least it should. Having a machine which needs to work perfectly very infrequently is also a major engineering challenge.
And even with e-Voting, some ballots will have to be printed for absentee voters, so the initial printing cost is there anyway.
Often the expensive part of printing is setting the press up in the first place. Since it needs a skilled person to do this, once running it may well be able to do things such as binding and boxing without any further human action.
Without voting, we don't live in a democracy.
This isn't actually the case. Not only are there plenty of examples, even from recent history. of elections which are effectivly for show it isn't even necessary to have elections to have a democratic form of government.
The system used in Classical Athens was arguably more democratic than the kind of systems we have today. (Which appear to owe their origins more to the Romans). The Atheneans even make use of machines, but instead of being for conducting elections these were used to randomly select citizens on a daily basis.
Paper ballots have to be counted by people. Lots of people. People are error-prone. And people could have agendas.
There is a simple way to address this. That is to have scrutineers. These people most definitly do have agendas, the agenda of a candidate scrutineer is to ensure that their candidate didn't lose due to either error or conspiracy.
Even if the risk that 1 person is making a mistake is 0.005% the risk is increased a if you have 5000 people counting votes. (It's not linear, but I can't remember enough of the statistics course to tell).
These mistakes are likely to be random. Using scrutineers is going to reduce the error rate by orders of magnitude. But it also makes conspiracy very unlikely, who ever heard of a conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people.
This is the reason you want machines to do the counting. It's what computers do best. At least properly configured.
A badly configured one may well have a non random error distribution. There are many problems with using machines. One is that it's considerably more difficult to scrutineer the process, to the point of being practically impossible once micro-electronics perform any significent role. Another problem is that you reduce the number of people involved, thus making conspiracy more possible.
Besides which it isn't so much a matter of figuring out what the voter wanted as figuring out whether they cast a vote which satisfies the formal legal requirements. This means (for simplicity I'll restrict this to lower house elections) that the voter numbered all squares next to the candidates names in a sequential order. If a voter puts a cross or a tick in the box, or leaves a number out of any of the boxes, etc that vote of course spoilt and must be discarded. Bear in mind we have exhaustive preferential voting. That is why I pointed to our exhaustive preferential system as a probable cause of the greater informality rate.
There is also the issue that there are many situations where filling in the ballot paper according to the rules does not reflect what they want to happen. Thus they can either break the rules and risk having their ballot ignored (once there are more than a certain proportion of "spoilt ballots" someone is going to look at "bending" said rules) or follow the rules with the risk of voting for someone they don't want to. Using a machine is likely to mean that only the latter is possible.
I've often wondered about that. I could see it if there are parallel elections happening at the same time. ie, vote for the president, vote for the governor, vote for the mayor, vote for the sheriff, vote for the dog-catcher, etc.
Something which only happens in one country.
But if it is a single election, there really is no need for anything fancier than a pencil and paper ballot system.
Even with parallel elections can can either count in parallel (assuming you have physically separate ballots) or serially (starting with the "most important" election first). Even if the US where there might be lots of parallel elections going on (with multiple elections on the same ballot paper preventing parallel counting) there is typically a huge amount of time to count.
How hard would it be to add an option "spoil vote".
Except that it wouldn't be one option it would be many options. Quite possibly where N! (with N being the number of candidates) was part of the formula for how many "spoil vote" options you'd need.
I didn't vote last weekend, but from the MOJ's Flash demo it seems that there is a button labeled "Äänestän tyhjää" ("I'm casting an empty vote") on the front page of this particular system.
Presuably an "empty vote" would be "I don't care", which not the same as "I want none of the listed candidates". With something like STV it's preferectly possible for a voter's position to be "My prefered candidate is B, If I can't have B then C, but I don't want to vote for any of the other candidates at all" or "I defintly don't want to vote for candidate A"...
Very often the people designing ballots do not account for every possible voter choice. Whilst a voter can apply a "patch" with a paper ballot they cannot do so with a machine. Note there have been elections where a significent number of voters have done something unexpected (even "against the rules"). e.g. indicated that the same candidate is both their first and second preference for a position.
They embed a bit of logic so that nonsense votes can't be cast,
What if a "nonsense vote" is exactly what the voter intended?
I keep hearing this argument about evoting, that it has a lower failure rate.
Can someone please find an actual study that confirms this? Or are they just hoping if something's repeated often enough it's taken as fact?
Even in theory this is questionable since a complex electronic system has many more possible failure modes than pieces of paper marked with a simple writing tool and collated by closely watched people.
Actually ministry of justice itself described 2% failure rate as "very high" compared to ordinary paper ballot. In Finland an ordinary failure rate for paper ballots cast would afaik be around 0,5% and that includes Donald Duck and offensive drawings, which are not available to evoters.
These are not "failures" indeed a system which cannot allow a voter to create a ""spoilt ballot" in a way which is clearly delibrate should itself be considered broken by design.
A big problem with "evoting" is that it can apply rules against a voter's intent e.g. preventing them from using an ommited "none of the above"; indicating with an STV system that they don't want some of the candidates under any circumstances; etc.
While we might argue about the specifics (searching laptops, etc.), hardly anyone has a problem with this. What the ACLU and most clear-headed people disagree with is the idea that this includes any area within 100 miles of the border. That's hardly "the nearest available transit points."
It also depends exactly how you define "the border". There'd probably be even more orange on the map if it were also to count every diplomatic mission and every airport as "border".
At least in this case, since the evidence came from a supposed good samaritan delivering the drive, it is unlikely the police have access to download logs or any useful ability to tap the guy's network connection. It was too late by the time they got the drive.
It's also far too late to know if the "evidence" has been tampered with. Even if the "good samaritan" is exactly what they appear to be a person with motive to harm the accused has had access to the machine.
(We won't even talk about the whole question of whether evidence obtained through a third-party seizure and delivered by a fourth party has any real validity, nor the question of whether the property was property seized by the landlord in the first place.)
We have no way of knowing who has done what with the machine. Even if the police were to follow the rules to the letter any so called "evidence" has already been tainted.
The biggest issues I see with going 4th amendment rights on this is the fact that the defendant doesn't own the computer anymore. From the article he lost it because of problems not paying rent. It changed hands to an uninvolved third party who noticed the files were on, now his, computer.
It's also impossible to prove that anything found on the computer is anything to do with the defendant. The rent dispute is an obvious motive for the former landlord to take all sorts of malicious actions.
Here's a clue: be upset with the stupid officers that could've followed procedure and actually nabbed the guy instead of being lazy and screwing up the case instead of the judge for enforcing the law.
Especially if those involved havn't been fired.
The chances of a md5 collision are more remote than the chances that someone else's DNA at a crime scene will match yours. Want to see for yourself? Get a calculator and do 36^32 and that's the number of different hashes you can get.
DNA certainly isn't random nor is there any reason to assume that MD5's of photographs are.
While he was still in court, a freshman in the school also hacked into the network. This time the file may have leaked, meaning that about 10,000 social security numbers (mine included) could have been released.
Why were they storing these in the first place? It fairly commonly happens that where there is a large data breach the reasons for storing most (even all) of the data were weak to non existant.
Any machine built for this purpose should at the very least be inspected (including code and all other pratical aspects) by an independant non-political technical review board.
How do you do you propose to do this in a way which is both useful and non destructive? Solid state microelectronics tends to require such steps as dunking in liquid nitrogen and using an electron microscope.
As a practical matter, nobody is 100% honorable, and somebody who's in charge of building voting machines should not be politically active.
The latter is probably quite close to the truth. In the US there just dosn't appear to be any tradition of the people running the election being independent of the candidates.
More importantly, we should switch to a form of voting in which a single company is not in a position to completely screw up the entire election.
That isn't actually too difficult. You simply make the electoral process as low tech and transparent as possible.