I think you hit the nail on the head. This might work, it might even work in parts of the US; but, there are plenty of us that take one look at this and immediately say, "hell no."
I grew up in outer suburbia, which I am sure colors my views. My parent's home sat on 3/4 of an acre, and that was about the norm in the area. Actually had a town ordinance which prevented sub-dividing lots below 4/10 acre. The builders hated that ordinance, but it may as well have been god's own word in that place; the last time the city council brought up a vote to change it, three of them were recalled. All the local political adds still include "And I support the lot size rule" or some variation thereof.
To this day, my dream home starts of with a minimum of an acre of land, 5 to 10 would be better. The actual house I'm less picky about, but I don't want to be close enough to my neighbors to hear them. Nothing worse than being woken up at 3am because your neighbor's car alarm is going off.
I think there is a way to go about it that would work.
The first thing that would have to be done is that we would need some guidelines as to what a "reasonable" level of security is, and even that might be scaled based on the type of information stored. This should then be re-evaluated yearly by a commission of qualified IT managers from industry. There are other limitations which should be placed on the commission, but that's outside the scope of this uninformed rant.
Just as an example:
Storing customer names and addresses - Database encryption and basic perimeter security may be considered reasonable. Losing data and not being there should result in fines and maybe some jail time.
Storing Credit Card info - Same as above, but add backup encryption, laptop hard-disk encryption, internal firewall for DB servers and source code audit on all applications with DB connections. Failure to comply and losing data would be hefty fines, jail time for those responsible for the systems, and civil liability to those people affected.
Storing Social Security Numbers - All the above,
but damages increase substantially, as does jail time, with c-level execs getting in on the PMITA action. And civil liability is increased to "the affected customers now own your ass" level.
The problem, of course, is that it would be the government doing it, so they would invariably screw it up.
Of course, by suing, they have probably created far more interest in the problem than a presentation at Defcon would have. The presentation would have been one of several interesting presentations, but would probably not have gained wide internet fame. Now, there are a bunch of people following it, and when the information hits the internet more people will look at it.
I'd say that this is more the other way around: Lose the battle, but win the war.
Yup, if it finds future files on your system, FlexLM goes nuts. Only fix I have found so far was to write a custom app to go through my system and touch every file with a future date. Messy, but it beats the other given solution of: reload your system.
I'll be even more specific than many. I support ESRI's ArcGIS Desktop (and their other stuff as well, but that is beside the point). In order to run the ArcInfo level of ArcDesktop, you are required to run a license server with a USB dongle. In fact, much of the software which revolves around the GIS community uses the same god damned, piece of shit, worthless license manager software (FlexLM). I'm lucky to get through the day without swearing about this junk at least once. It's engendered a special version of Tourette's Syndrome in me.
Like most license servers, it needs just enough resources to boot and respond to network requests, in other words, about as much as a pocket calculator. It also needs to be on, always. A perfect candidate for virtualization; it gets the needed resources, doesn't have to be collocated with another service which might require a reboot from time to time, and can be in a high availability cluster, so it stays on. The reason this isn't on my ESX servers, is that it has to have that stupid USB dongle.
All that said, seeing the bug in VMWare this morning, aw fuck me!
Ya, thought about the same. When I read 'holographic' my BS detector started making noise. Watching the video, the needle just moved further towards the 'is BS' side. Maybe its the way the technology works and/or gets recorded, but the perspective just seems wrong.
And the hand positions just seem unnatural. He has his hands curled around something the entire time. Granted, some sort of pointing device isn't bad, and real buttons can be nice in that the system really knows when you pushed it and doesn't have to guess based on hand position.
In all, this seems like a nice video of vapor-ware, with nothing substantive to back it up.
The issue with your examples is that they've all occurred overseas.
That's actually a bad thing for the government. In all of those cases, the US Military has had safe haven well away from the enemy. They have had a ready industrial base to produce the weapons and equipment it takes to fight a modern war.
If we ever have need of a home grown insurgency, those advantages will be gone. Politicians will be sniped regularly. For example in recent times, JFK was shot, and Regan was shot, both while under the watchful eye of the Secret Service. Also, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed. It doesn't take an army to kill one man, it takes a gun and a bit of luck.
And the industrial base which a modern military relies on would be in shambles. Simple explosives are not hard to make. Delivery is also trivial. The insurgency in Iraq have proven these two statements time and again; Timothy McVeigh also demonstrated this locally. Tanks need fuel, howitzers need shells. Such a war is not going to be fought and won by overwhelming force, it could only be won through attrition and propaganda. The Government would be relying on the majority of the populous being against the insurgency. And such an insurgency would only work, and hopefully only ever be started, because the abuses of the Government are so great and obvious that the people are ready to fight over it.
I don't think such a fight is as cut and dried as you would have people believe. I am not going to say that the people would necessarily win. However, I would rather have a fighting chance and die trying to fight tyranny than to roll over and accept it, because it would be a hard fight. Our country was founded on the ideal that liberty is worth fighting for; that our rights as people are worth fighting for; and that, should it come to it, it is better to die fighting a free man, than to accept tyranny.
I cannot say it any better than the great Patrick Henry:
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!""
(adjusts tinfoil hat)
Removing a Supreme Court Judge doesn't require an amendment, it just requires engineering an accident.
But then, we've never known Bush Co. to be willing to kill people, right?
Maybe I'm being an optimist this morning, but I don't think such an amendment would pass. Thankfully, the amendment processes for the Constitution have a pretty high bar to leap. Ignoring the process which has never happened, a bill would have to pass both houses of congress with a 2/3 majority. Now assuming that Satan is making snow demons at that point, it then has to be ratified by 2/3 of the States.
I'll put my money on the snowball in hell before I'd bet on this type of amendment passing. We'll always have the few nut-cases who think that anything is ok to "protect America" but I think those numbers have shrunk well beyond the point of getting an amendment passed.
We've had that for quite some time. Look up the laws governing sex tourism. If, for example, you visit a country where underage prostitution occurs, and engage in it the law enforcement folks state-side will pick you up once you get back and toss you in jail.
Moreover, I don't have a problem stating that the US Government, in toto, is ruled by the Constitution no matter where they happen to be. The US Constitution is not a limit on an unlimited government, it is a grant of power to an otherwise powerless group of people. The US Federal Government exists and gains its powers from the US Constitution, if any part of the Federal Government wishes to claim that the Constitution does not apply to them, then they are declaring themselves illegitimate, and should be removed with prejudice as part of an insurrection.
I agree that is a problem. Right now the best solution seems to be have representatives from several dissimilarly interested parties involved directly in the counting. Ideally with enough difference of opinion that any one would out the others. The problem, of course, would be if all of the people involved in the counting were in collusion.
As for ending anonymous voting, the threat of coercion is just too great. We might as well have armed thugs voting for us. At the very least, with the fraud route it requires either a high level of sophistication or coordination. Just to get around the paper trail idea, it requires buying off everyone involved in the counting. One leak and the jig is up. With coercion, the effort can be so distributed that it becomes a nightmare to track down.
By itself, nothing, but it is part of a system for adding some level of checking.
Couldn't the software falsify the paper trail?
Yes, but it becomes easier to spot.
Who does the verifying and who verifies the verifyers?
Here's the crux of thew whole system I mentioned: Does your E-Vote equipment produce a voter verifieable paper trail?
A voter verifiable paper trail doesn't just spit a piece of paper into a locked box. It spits out a piece of paper which the voter can read over and then drop in a locked box. The system relies on each voter knowing how they voted, being able to recognize that the piece of paper is wrong, and reporting it.
The biggest hole in the system is that the locked box needs to be kept, and transported in such a way to ensure the integrity of its contents. The usual method for this is that no side in the election is ever give unsupervised access to the box. Same as we deal with paper ballots at the moment.
Also, this system assumes that the paper ballots are counted at some point, and that discrepancies with the computer count are reported.
Sure, there are holes and ways in which the system could be attacked. But it beats the hell out of the votes being counted by a black box, and no verification happening. As with any security, it's never going to be 100% perfect, the goal is to make breaking it so difficult that it becomes impractical with the resources at hand.
That was my thought. You build out the network to provide as much bandwidth as you can squeeze out of the 25Mhz spectrum, and then provide a small cut of it free, and censored. With the rest of the bandwidth, you provide a mix of speeds and censoring for a price.
Though, I expect that there will also be a rider in the requirements somewhere which will also require a Carnivore like system be setup so that the FBI et al. can Protect Us From Terrorists(TM). But maybe that's just my tinfoil showing again.
Gum will be the next thing banned after these cameras show up. Just start chewing a piece in the concourse, tear off a small bits as you enter the plane and apply to the lenses as you pass and to your own as you stow your carry on luggage overhead. Even once they get it off, I still doubt that the camera will be very useful until it has had a thorough cleaning.
What I find interesting about that is that a similar law was struck down in the supreme court a few years back. I'm surprised they'd pass a law so similar, seeing as how it's likely to get struck down in the future. Does anyone know what the differences are between this one and the one that was struck down?
It's an election year. I didn't RTFA, and didn't need to. This is all about grandstanding and having the appearance of "doing something to protect the children".
This will probably face the same beat-down the last one got at the SCOUTS. And they will pass it again and again and again. They won't change anything, but they will look like heroes every time they do.
I had the exact same memory error on a system I built for a friend. I threw 8GB of RAM in, as RAM is cheap and good for performance (ya, probably overkill for the moment). Boot the CD, and BSOD during the install. Figured I had a bad stick and ran memtest overnight, no errors. Drive test is clean. Oh boy, probably Motherboard or CPU. Decide to google a bit before starting the RMA and found the hotfix. Pulled a couple sticks of RAM, loaded Vista just fine, installed the hotfix, put the RAM back in. The system is now a nice gaming powerhouse.
Also, it'll do it with your registry. One of Vista's features is that it virtualizes system folders, files and registry entries. When you go to edit one of those areas, and fail to do it with Admin rights (i.e. right-click, Run As Administrator), the change will be stored in your profile and only applied when you log in. It's neat because you can walk away from a fuck up easily; it's annoying because you may forget to run as admin when opening regedit or cmd. This is actually one of the features I really like from Vista. That and the built in chess game are my biggest "want to have" features.
I'm not much on the Aero interface, but my wife loves it. She's easily sold on shiny, and I'm not gonna fight it. On XP, too many people I support (I'm in IT for a living) use the Crayola interface, so I use it to be used to it.
I'll risk the "MS Apologist" brand as well.
Vista isn't that bad, but contrary to the marketing materials, you will need a pretty good system to run it. My wife's system runs it just fine, and she loves it. The games she plays on it run fine, but it was a fairly high end system when she bought it, and isn't that bad at the moment. The only change she had to make in going to Vista was going from 1GB to 2GB of RAM.
My system, on the other hand, is falling to the bottom of the totem pole; and Vista is horrible on it. I can play most games on it with reasonable graphics settings, in XP. When I tried Vista on it, many of the games became unplayable at the exact same video settings. So, I'm back on XP (haven't installed SP3 yet).
In all, the biggest problem I see with Vista is that it does take up more resources, and is really meant for newer systems. If you have a good system, you can have all the flashy Vista interface. If you have a marginal system already, stick with the Crayola interface in XP.
What, the US doesn't run the world yet? I need to talk to my congressman.;-)
Seriously though, this was intended as a US system, though it could be equally applied in any country which wished to, just modify based on the local currency and its value. As it stands, copyrights are on a per country basis, with some trading going on. While a worldwide system would be convenient, there isn't exactly an organization which could enforce such a thing. WIPO/WTO can only talk about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you hit the nail on the head. This might work, it might even work in parts of the US; but, there are plenty of us that take one look at this and immediately say, "hell no."
I grew up in outer suburbia, which I am sure colors my views. My parent's home sat on 3/4 of an acre, and that was about the norm in the area. Actually had a town ordinance which prevented sub-dividing lots below 4/10 acre. The builders hated that ordinance, but it may as well have been god's own word in that place; the last time the city council brought up a vote to change it, three of them were recalled. All the local political adds still include "And I support the lot size rule" or some variation thereof.
To this day, my dream home starts of with a minimum of an acre of land, 5 to 10 would be better. The actual house I'm less picky about, but I don't want to be close enough to my neighbors to hear them. Nothing worse than being woken up at 3am because your neighbor's car alarm is going off.
I think there is a way to go about it that would work.
The first thing that would have to be done is that we would need some guidelines as to what a "reasonable" level of security is, and even that might be scaled based on the type of information stored. This should then be re-evaluated yearly by a commission of qualified IT managers from industry. There are other limitations which should be placed on the commission, but that's outside the scope of this uninformed rant.
Just as an example:
Storing customer names and addresses - Database encryption and basic perimeter security may be considered reasonable. Losing data and not being there should result in fines and maybe some jail time.
Storing Credit Card info - Same as above, but add backup encryption, laptop hard-disk encryption, internal firewall for DB servers and source code audit on all applications with DB connections. Failure to comply and losing data would be hefty fines, jail time for those responsible for the systems, and civil liability to those people affected.
Storing Social Security Numbers - All the above, but damages increase substantially, as does jail time, with c-level execs getting in on the PMITA action. And civil liability is increased to "the affected customers now own your ass" level.
The problem, of course, is that it would be the government doing it, so they would invariably screw it up.
Of course, by suing, they have probably created far more interest in the problem than a presentation at Defcon would have. The presentation would have been one of several interesting presentations, but would probably not have gained wide internet fame. Now, there are a bunch of people following it, and when the information hits the internet more people will look at it.
I'd say that this is more the other way around: Lose the battle, but win the war.
Yup, if it finds future files on your system, FlexLM goes nuts. Only fix I have found so far was to write a custom app to go through my system and touch every file with a future date. Messy, but it beats the other given solution of: reload your system.
I'll be even more specific than many. I support ESRI's ArcGIS Desktop (and their other stuff as well, but that is beside the point). In order to run the ArcInfo level of ArcDesktop, you are required to run a license server with a USB dongle. In fact, much of the software which revolves around the GIS community uses the same god damned, piece of shit, worthless license manager software (FlexLM). I'm lucky to get through the day without swearing about this junk at least once. It's engendered a special version of Tourette's Syndrome in me.
Like most license servers, it needs just enough resources to boot and respond to network requests, in other words, about as much as a pocket calculator. It also needs to be on, always. A perfect candidate for virtualization; it gets the needed resources, doesn't have to be collocated with another service which might require a reboot from time to time, and can be in a high availability cluster, so it stays on. The reason this isn't on my ESX servers, is that it has to have that stupid USB dongle.
All that said, seeing the bug in VMWare this morning, aw fuck me!
Ya, thought about the same. When I read 'holographic' my BS detector started making noise. Watching the video, the needle just moved further towards the 'is BS' side. Maybe its the way the technology works and/or gets recorded, but the perspective just seems wrong.
And the hand positions just seem unnatural. He has his hands curled around something the entire time. Granted, some sort of pointing device isn't bad, and real buttons can be nice in that the system really knows when you pushed it and doesn't have to guess based on hand position.
In all, this seems like a nice video of vapor-ware, with nothing substantive to back it up.
Alas, I hail from an earlier time, when people thought that what they did mattered, and that the future was somehow our responsibility.
Really? 'cause it looks like you guys dropped the ball from this side of the generational divide.
Sorry, I didn't think I needed these:
<sarcasm>
my previous post here
</sarcasm>
Indeed, you would almost expect a the US Bureau of Land Management to be up to their eyeballs in applications to build solar plants...
It does NOT work.
The 1970's called, they want their argument back
Certainly solar power is a failure
The issue with your examples is that they've all occurred overseas.
That's actually a bad thing for the government. In all of those cases, the US Military has had safe haven well away from the enemy. They have had a ready industrial base to produce the weapons and equipment it takes to fight a modern war.
If we ever have need of a home grown insurgency, those advantages will be gone. Politicians will be sniped regularly. For example in recent times, JFK was shot, and Regan was shot, both while under the watchful eye of the Secret Service. Also, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed. It doesn't take an army to kill one man, it takes a gun and a bit of luck.
And the industrial base which a modern military relies on would be in shambles. Simple explosives are not hard to make. Delivery is also trivial. The insurgency in Iraq have proven these two statements time and again; Timothy McVeigh also demonstrated this locally. Tanks need fuel, howitzers need shells. Such a war is not going to be fought and won by overwhelming force, it could only be won through attrition and propaganda. The Government would be relying on the majority of the populous being against the insurgency. And such an insurgency would only work, and hopefully only ever be started, because the abuses of the Government are so great and obvious that the people are ready to fight over it.
I don't think such a fight is as cut and dried as you would have people believe. I am not going to say that the people would necessarily win. However, I would rather have a fighting chance and die trying to fight tyranny than to roll over and accept it, because it would be a hard fight. Our country was founded on the ideal that liberty is worth fighting for; that our rights as people are worth fighting for; and that, should it come to it, it is better to die fighting a free man, than to accept tyranny.
I cannot say it any better than the great Patrick Henry: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!""
Pull the other one, it has bells attached.
power to remove a supreme court judge
(adjusts tinfoil hat)
Removing a Supreme Court Judge doesn't require an amendment, it just requires engineering an accident.
But then, we've never known Bush Co. to be willing to kill people, right?
Maybe I'm being an optimist this morning, but I don't think such an amendment would pass. Thankfully, the amendment processes for the Constitution have a pretty high bar to leap. Ignoring the process which has never happened, a bill would have to pass both houses of congress with a 2/3 majority. Now assuming that Satan is making snow demons at that point, it then has to be ratified by 2/3 of the States.
I'll put my money on the snowball in hell before I'd bet on this type of amendment passing. We'll always have the few nut-cases who think that anything is ok to "protect America" but I think those numbers have shrunk well beyond the point of getting an amendment passed.
We've had that for quite some time. Look up the laws governing sex tourism. If, for example, you visit a country where underage prostitution occurs, and engage in it the law enforcement folks state-side will pick you up once you get back and toss you in jail.
Moreover, I don't have a problem stating that the US Government, in toto, is ruled by the Constitution no matter where they happen to be. The US Constitution is not a limit on an unlimited government, it is a grant of power to an otherwise powerless group of people. The US Federal Government exists and gains its powers from the US Constitution, if any part of the Federal Government wishes to claim that the Constitution does not apply to them, then they are declaring themselves illegitimate, and should be removed with prejudice as part of an insurrection.
[The US Constitution] isn't a restriction on an otherwise-unlimited government, it's a grant of powers to an otherwise-powerless government.
And me without mod points. Damn.
Very well said, students in school should be forced to repeat this statement until they understand what it means.
I agree that is a problem. Right now the best solution seems to be have representatives from several dissimilarly interested parties involved directly in the counting. Ideally with enough difference of opinion that any one would out the others. The problem, of course, would be if all of the people involved in the counting were in collusion.
As for ending anonymous voting, the threat of coercion is just too great. We might as well have armed thugs voting for us. At the very least, with the fraud route it requires either a high level of sophistication or coordination. Just to get around the paper trail idea, it requires buying off everyone involved in the counting. One leak and the jig is up. With coercion, the effort can be so distributed that it becomes a nightmare to track down.
What does a paper trail do on its own?
By itself, nothing, but it is part of a system for adding some level of checking.
Couldn't the software falsify the paper trail?
Yes, but it becomes easier to spot.
Who does the verifying and who verifies the verifyers?
Here's the crux of thew whole system I mentioned:
Does your E-Vote equipment produce a voter verifieable paper trail?
A voter verifiable paper trail doesn't just spit a piece of paper into a locked box. It spits out a piece of paper which the voter can read over and then drop in a locked box. The system relies on each voter knowing how they voted, being able to recognize that the piece of paper is wrong, and reporting it.
The biggest hole in the system is that the locked box needs to be kept, and transported in such a way to ensure the integrity of its contents. The usual method for this is that no side in the election is ever give unsupervised access to the box. Same as we deal with paper ballots at the moment.
Also, this system assumes that the paper ballots are counted at some point, and that discrepancies with the computer count are reported.
Sure, there are holes and ways in which the system could be attacked. But it beats the hell out of the votes being counted by a black box, and no verification happening. As with any security, it's never going to be 100% perfect, the goal is to make breaking it so difficult that it becomes impractical with the resources at hand.
That was my thought. You build out the network to provide as much bandwidth as you can squeeze out of the 25Mhz spectrum, and then provide a small cut of it free, and censored. With the rest of the bandwidth, you provide a mix of speeds and censoring for a price.
Though, I expect that there will also be a rider in the requirements somewhere which will also require a Carnivore like system be setup so that the FBI et al. can Protect Us From Terrorists(TM). But maybe that's just my tinfoil showing again.
Gum will be the next thing banned after these cameras show up. Just start chewing a piece in the concourse, tear off a small bits as you enter the plane and apply to the lenses as you pass and to your own as you stow your carry on luggage overhead. Even once they get it off, I still doubt that the camera will be very useful until it has had a thorough cleaning.
What I find interesting about that is that a similar law was struck down in the supreme court a few years back. I'm surprised they'd pass a law so similar, seeing as how it's likely to get struck down in the future. Does anyone know what the differences are between this one and the one that was struck down?
It's an election year. I didn't RTFA, and didn't need to. This is all about grandstanding and having the appearance of "doing something to protect the children".
This will probably face the same beat-down the last one got at the SCOUTS. And they will pass it again and again and again. They won't change anything, but they will look like heroes every time they do.
I had the exact same memory error on a system I built for a friend. I threw 8GB of RAM in, as RAM is cheap and good for performance (ya, probably overkill for the moment). Boot the CD, and BSOD during the install. Figured I had a bad stick and ran memtest overnight, no errors. Drive test is clean. Oh boy, probably Motherboard or CPU. Decide to google a bit before starting the RMA and found the hotfix. Pulled a couple sticks of RAM, loaded Vista just fine, installed the hotfix, put the RAM back in. The system is now a nice gaming powerhouse.
Also, it'll do it with your registry. One of Vista's features is that it virtualizes system folders, files and registry entries. When you go to edit one of those areas, and fail to do it with Admin rights (i.e. right-click, Run As Administrator), the change will be stored in your profile and only applied when you log in. It's neat because you can walk away from a fuck up easily; it's annoying because you may forget to run as admin when opening regedit or cmd. This is actually one of the features I really like from Vista. That and the built in chess game are my biggest "want to have" features.
I'm not much on the Aero interface, but my wife loves it. She's easily sold on shiny, and I'm not gonna fight it. On XP, too many people I support (I'm in IT for a living) use the Crayola interface, so I use it to be used to it.
I'll risk the "MS Apologist" brand as well.
Vista isn't that bad, but contrary to the marketing materials, you will need a pretty good system to run it. My wife's system runs it just fine, and she loves it. The games she plays on it run fine, but it was a fairly high end system when she bought it, and isn't that bad at the moment. The only change she had to make in going to Vista was going from 1GB to 2GB of RAM.
My system, on the other hand, is falling to the bottom of the totem pole; and Vista is horrible on it. I can play most games on it with reasonable graphics settings, in XP. When I tried Vista on it, many of the games became unplayable at the exact same video settings. So, I'm back on XP (haven't installed SP3 yet).
In all, the biggest problem I see with Vista is that it does take up more resources, and is really meant for newer systems. If you have a good system, you can have all the flashy Vista interface. If you have a marginal system already, stick with the Crayola interface in XP.
What, the US doesn't run the world yet? I need to talk to my congressman. ;-)
Seriously though, this was intended as a US system, though it could be equally applied in any country which wished to, just modify based on the local currency and its value. As it stands, copyrights are on a per country basis, with some trading going on. While a worldwide system would be convenient, there isn't exactly an organization which could enforce such a thing. WIPO/WTO can only talk about it.