Yeah, but it's firmware that does a lot of hairy shit. Getting the CPU to talk to everything on the board and doing it at the maximum possible speed is not for the faint of heart.
That said, I see now with AMD64 that the CPU is the memory controller, so maybe it won't be so bad.
Again, I think this is a comment borne of a A+ grade achieved in a government-run public school.
If someone is going to threaten to break your fingers if you don't vote their way, it is hard to see how they might be deterred by your vote remaining private.
Especially if we're talking about national or state office. That fraud might be experiencde at the dog catcher level doesn't particularly concern me. Dog catchers don't get to lie to the people in order to wage war.
Any decision about public policy should be viewed through a lense that asks this one simple question: does it work to aggregate power?
Publicizing votes works against the aggregation of power.
Here's the thing... I put Red Hat on my system with the expectation that it's going to be around for some time. By pulling support for the product, they're costing me time. Why should I make the same mistake with Fedora?
They screwed up here, big time. There are lots of distros out there to choose from. And that's exactly what people are going to do: choose from these other distros.
OTOH, I wasn't comfortable with RH's dominance in the industry to begin with, and this bit of bone-headed thinking on their part combined with Novell/SuSE addresses this to my satisfaction.
Yes, I do understand that the identify of the voter and the vote itself has to be published. That's required so that you and I can get on the phone and verify to one another that we each indeed voted in the way that's been published.
I've addressed the issue of vote purchasing elsewhere in this thread; it suffices to say that I don't see it as a significant problem, at least not when compared to all of the other problems we are experiencing.
That said, you make some really good points about this new system. It's still fairly complicated though, I can see that it is going to be expensive, and verification appears to be possible only for a few people, but it's a step in the right direction.
Because then people who have nothing to offer but money, by definition the worst candidates, will come into power.
Not at all like the current system, is it.:)
Seriously though, the kind of cash that would be required to buy an election this way is prohibitive, certainly at the federal and state levels. It isn't going to be a problem, or at least, it isn't going to compare to the problems we are experiencing presently.
Cynicism gets us nowhere.
It's not cynicism, it's reality. Money is indisputably a corrupting influence in our elections, regardless of whether we disclose votes or not.
And neither does fratboy libertarianism.
If you can't understand libertarianism, just say so. There's no need to get abusive.
Sorry, this is something I learned in a political science class.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't mean anything to me. Moreover, the term political science is an oxymoron at best, a cruel and cynical charade at worst. Any effort to enlighten only a small portion of the people as to the way politics works is elitist and, necessarily, counterproductive to the principal goal of democracy: the distribution of power.
This idea blatantly disenfrachises a whole class of people and can therefore be taken off the table.
No, it doesn't, and you haven't demonstrated otherwise.
That's because we have private voting. Lets keep it that way so this isn't the number one issue.
LOL! So a horribly corrupt system is better than a merely flawed system. Oh man, that's some really advanced thinking on your part.
I can see that you are concerned about voting accuracy but I assure you, there is no magic bullet.
Of course there is. Illuminate the process. Complete disclosure.
The only people who want the process to remain in the shadows are those who are busy exploiting it for their own advantage today.
No, I mean that the votes should be published in a way where everyone gets to see how everyone else voted.
It's important that I be able to call you on the phone and confirm that the way you voted matches the way I see you've voted. This is so that we can prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.
Otherwise, a sophisticated adversary could accept your vote, and then when asked to confirm it, produce a record that confirms your vote, knowing that it is you who is requesting it. The vote that is actually registered however would reflect their choice, and not yours, and you would never be the wiser.
For one, about 40% of people don't vote for the party they are registered for and probably only a few percent just vote the ticket....
I think that's way, way off, but feel free to back it up with a link or two. 40%?!? I have to see that to believe it.
For two, I'm not registered as any party for exactly the reason you point out.
And you don't have to vote either. It's simple... if your station in life is such that you can't even cast what amounts to one out of a million votes without fear of reprisal of some kind, then don't vote.
Sure, we will lose a few votes that way, but what we gain in return is worth it. An election with integrity. Neither you nor I can say with any certainty how many votes are corrupted in the present system.
For three, how can you buy a vote if you can't verify who it was for?
Excuse me, but the buying of votes... isn't that the system we're already laboring under? I'd rather see the people who own the votes selling them than people like Diebold, et al, doing it.
Besides, the buying and selling of votes is a grossly overrated problem. If you were to stack up all of the injustices experienced in our democracy and compare them, I'd wager that the outright buying of votes wouldn't even rate in the top ten.
I know everybody was taught in social studies to believe that the secret ballot is the pillar of democracy, but even a casual review of the facts shows otherwise.
The secret ballot only benefits those who depend on its vulnerabilities.
Are you honestly advocating jail for these people based on statistical analysis?
No. But the statistical analysis could serve as evidence, or even a red flag that prosecutors could use to investigate the matter more thoroughly.
If a pattern emerges where people who vote a certain way and are then fired, and some number of those people allege that they were fired because they didn't vote the way their employer dictated, then I think you have a pretty good case.
More importantly, the employer is effectively deterred from engaging in this sort of behavior.
P.S. I'm jealous of the fact that you seem to keep getting instantly modded up.:P
First of all, just in case you didn't notice, I still said I'm in favour of it.:)
Yup, I noticed. It's just that the intimidation argument is brought up a lot and I've mentally macro-keyed a response to it.
Say in your hypothetical that the boss doesn't ever say anything about it, but only ever lays off people who vote the other way. Then when questioned, all the voters could honestly say that they voted with the boss and that he didn't intimidate them.
But that would be a pattern that would eventually be demonstrated, and therefore, actionable. It's public knowledge who gets layed off, and it's public knowledge who these layed off workers voted for. Put the two together and you've got a case.
BTW...publishing votes is a horrible idea...do you really want organized crime lords becomming president through corruption and intimidation?...oh wait...
Yeah, wait.
I'm curious though... how do you see the publishing of a vote as being any different than registering for a political party?
That said, I am reading the spec (again), and while I'm still not convinced that it is tamperproof, I do agree with you that the eye-candy aspect is going to be very appealing and is a nifty bit of thinking on the author's part.
The only real issue with that is that you run the risk of people getting "punished" for their vote.
Yeah, this is what everyone always says in response, but I think that if you think about it, it isn't as great a problem as it first might seem.
For instance, the AC who replied before you talks about the retribution one might face from the boss for voting "the wrong way." But if your boss is intimidating you into voting a certain way, then isn't he also intimidating all your co-workers into voting the same way? And if all the votes are published, wouldn't it be easy to demonstrate then that your boss was engaging in felony conduct? All you'd have to do is show how everyone in your company voted the same way, something you wouldn't be able to do under the present system.
Which suggests to me that it is the present system that is the most susceptible to coercion and intimidation.
Most lay people assume the voting system is secure simply by virtue of it being computerized.
I haven't looked at the spec for this yet, but I have to believe that this cannot be the answer, simply because most people won't be able to understand how this system is any different than the (electronic) one it replaces.
More than anything else, voters have to be able to trust that their vote is being counted. And there will always be talk of powerful interests being given backdoors or being able to skew the results using exotic technologies like quantum cryptoanalysis.
The only sure way of a) having a legitimate election where b) everyone can know their vote was counted is by c) publishing all the votes.
Publish the votes. No batteries (cryptographic or otherwise) required.
We're talking about a dumb terminal here, aren't we? Let the user login with his card, enter a passcode, then enter input which gets sent to a server somewhere to be processed and which sends back either output to be displayed to the user or output to be read by the machine which gives you your money.
The same criticism applies to Diebold's voting machines.
This is why Linux would be such an ideal solution. No application of Linux has impressed me more than the (now sadly defunct) Linux Router Project, simply because it demonstrated how for many tasks most of the operating system amounted to nothing more than ballast. They were able to boot a router from a floppy.
This is how I think an ATM--or a voting machine--should work. The amount of software should be kept to an absolute minimum if for no other reason than that it minimizes complexity, and in these kinds of applications, complexity is the mother of all evil.
And in the case of the voting machines, it would also greatly assist in auditing the code and making sure that what you think is executing is what's executing.
Israel leads the world in Internet attacks, ergo I think the numbers here are probably skewed. It's probably best to perform research like this in a nation that's, um, a little less on the brink.
JERUSALEM (UPI) -- A survey by Symantec says Middle Eastern countries comprised six of the top 10 bases for Internet attacks, it was reported Monday.
In the first half of 2003, the top offenders included Israel as well as Iran, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, WorldTribune.com said.
Symantec ranked the threats according to the size of a country's Internet population base. Israel was cited as the biggest source of Web-based attacks with an Internet user base of more than 1 million, Middle East Newsline reported.
About 80 percent of all attacks originated from systems located in 10 countries.
"The Internet is a great leveler and the issue of Web security in the Middle East is no different from any other part of the world," Kevin Isaac, regional director at Symantec, said.
"Wherever there is high bandwidth availability and a proliferation of the Internet, the chances of breaches taking place are high."
Forgive my ignorance. I am new to Debian, having just been spurned by the people at Red Hat.
I see what you're saying, and while I would be happy with Jigdo, I would think that Debian and the mirrors would rather we use BitTorrent. It saves them bandwidth, and I get my ISO's without further fuss.
But I do what you're talking about now. Jigdo does seem very nice.
With over 300 mirrors, I doubt this crowd will be able to kill "the server".
From the Debian website:
There are less mirrors of these images due to space and bandwidth constraints, so these downloads can be quite slow.
Debian would rather you didn't download the ISO's, in favor of Jigdo. However, I prefer ISO's. I live having the whole distro laid out in however many CD's it takes, so I don't have to worry about the network running or having everything I need to do the install.
Sometimes distros forget to include stuff you need in a specific package. Getting everything at once helps to preclude that inevitability.
The only way to be sure that your vote is recorded is by looking it up in a ledger somewhere or a newspaper that prints it or on a website that lists it.
Anything else is (and has been and will continue to be) subject to fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but it's firmware that does a lot of hairy shit. Getting the CPU to talk to everything on the board and doing it at the maximum possible speed is not for the faint of heart.
That said, I see now with AMD64 that the CPU is the memory controller, so maybe it won't be so bad.
Again, I think this is a comment borne of a A+ grade achieved in a government-run public school.
If someone is going to threaten to break your fingers if you don't vote their way, it is hard to see how they might be deterred by your vote remaining private.
Especially if we're talking about national or state office. That fraud might be experiencde at the dog catcher level doesn't particularly concern me. Dog catchers don't get to lie to the people in order to wage war.
Any decision about public policy should be viewed through a lense that asks this one simple question: does it work to aggregate power?
Publicizing votes works against the aggregation of power.
Ergo, publicizing votes is the right thing to do.
Here's the thing... I put Red Hat on my system with the expectation that it's going to be around for some time. By pulling support for the product, they're costing me time. Why should I make the same mistake with Fedora?
They screwed up here, big time. There are lots of distros out there to choose from. And that's exactly what people are going to do: choose from these other distros.
OTOH, I wasn't comfortable with RH's dominance in the industry to begin with, and this bit of bone-headed thinking on their part combined with Novell/SuSE addresses this to my satisfaction.
Yes, I do understand that the identify of the voter and the vote itself has to be published. That's required so that you and I can get on the phone and verify to one another that we each indeed voted in the way that's been published.
I've addressed the issue of vote purchasing elsewhere in this thread; it suffices to say that I don't see it as a significant problem, at least not when compared to all of the other problems we are experiencing.
That said, you make some really good points about this new system. It's still fairly complicated though, I can see that it is going to be expensive, and verification appears to be possible only for a few people, but it's a step in the right direction.
Because then people who have nothing to offer but money, by definition the worst candidates, will come into power.
:)
Not at all like the current system, is it.
Seriously though, the kind of cash that would be required to buy an election this way is prohibitive, certainly at the federal and state levels. It isn't going to be a problem, or at least, it isn't going to compare to the problems we are experiencing presently.
Cynicism gets us nowhere.
It's not cynicism, it's reality. Money is indisputably a corrupting influence in our elections, regardless of whether we disclose votes or not.
And neither does fratboy libertarianism.
If you can't understand libertarianism, just say so. There's no need to get abusive.
Sorry, this is something I learned in a political science class.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't mean anything to me. Moreover, the term political science is an oxymoron at best, a cruel and cynical charade at worst. Any effort to enlighten only a small portion of the people as to the way politics works is elitist and, necessarily, counterproductive to the principal goal of democracy: the distribution of power.
This idea blatantly disenfrachises a whole class of people and can therefore be taken off the table.
No, it doesn't, and you haven't demonstrated otherwise.
That's because we have private voting. Lets keep it that way so this isn't the number one issue.
LOL! So a horribly corrupt system is better than a merely flawed system. Oh man, that's some really advanced thinking on your part.
I can see that you are concerned about voting accuracy but I assure you, there is no magic bullet.
Of course there is. Illuminate the process. Complete disclosure.
The only people who want the process to remain in the shadows are those who are busy exploiting it for their own advantage today.
What about it?
Why shouldn't you be able to sell your vote?
It's better than someone else selling your vote for you, isn't it?
How you arrive at this decision should be entirely up to you.
No, I mean that the votes should be published in a way where everyone gets to see how everyone else voted.
It's important that I be able to call you on the phone and confirm that the way you voted matches the way I see you've voted. This is so that we can prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.
Otherwise, a sophisticated adversary could accept your vote, and then when asked to confirm it, produce a record that confirms your vote, knowing that it is you who is requesting it. The vote that is actually registered however would reflect their choice, and not yours, and you would never be the wiser.
For one, about 40% of people don't vote for the party they are registered for and probably only a few percent just vote the ticket....
I think that's way, way off, but feel free to back it up with a link or two. 40%?!? I have to see that to believe it.
For two, I'm not registered as any party for exactly the reason you point out.
And you don't have to vote either. It's simple... if your station in life is such that you can't even cast what amounts to one out of a million votes without fear of reprisal of some kind, then don't vote.
Sure, we will lose a few votes that way, but what we gain in return is worth it. An election with integrity. Neither you nor I can say with any certainty how many votes are corrupted in the present system.
For three, how can you buy a vote if you can't verify who it was for?
Excuse me, but the buying of votes... isn't that the system we're already laboring under? I'd rather see the people who own the votes selling them than people like Diebold, et al, doing it.
Besides, the buying and selling of votes is a grossly overrated problem. If you were to stack up all of the injustices experienced in our democracy and compare them, I'd wager that the outright buying of votes wouldn't even rate in the top ten.
I know everybody was taught in social studies to believe that the secret ballot is the pillar of democracy, but even a casual review of the facts shows otherwise.
The secret ballot only benefits those who depend on its vulnerabilities.
Are you honestly advocating jail for these people based on statistical analysis?
:P
No. But the statistical analysis could serve as evidence, or even a red flag that prosecutors could use to investigate the matter more thoroughly.
If a pattern emerges where people who vote a certain way and are then fired, and some number of those people allege that they were fired because they didn't vote the way their employer dictated, then I think you have a pretty good case.
More importantly, the employer is effectively deterred from engaging in this sort of behavior.
P.S. I'm jealous of the fact that you seem to keep getting instantly modded up.
Don't be. I post at 2 because I'm a karma whore.
First of all, just in case you didn't notice, I still said I'm in favour of it. :)
Yup, I noticed. It's just that the intimidation argument is brought up a lot and I've mentally macro-keyed a response to it.
Say in your hypothetical that the boss doesn't ever say anything about it, but only ever lays off people who vote the other way. Then when questioned, all the voters could honestly say that they voted with the boss and that he didn't intimidate them.
But that would be a pattern that would eventually be demonstrated, and therefore, actionable. It's public knowledge who gets layed off, and it's public knowledge who these layed off workers voted for. Put the two together and you've got a case.
Then make up a URL and tell them it's their new home page.
(and that if they want to change it that they'll have to wait till next X-mas.)
BTW...publishing votes is a horrible idea...do you really want organized crime lords becomming president through corruption and intimidation? ...oh wait...
Yeah, wait.
I'm curious though... how do you see the publishing of a vote as being any different than registering for a political party?
That said, I am reading the spec (again), and while I'm still not convinced that it is tamperproof, I do agree with you that the eye-candy aspect is going to be very appealing and is a nifty bit of thinking on the author's part.
The only real issue with that is that you run the risk of people getting "punished" for their vote.
Yeah, this is what everyone always says in response, but I think that if you think about it, it isn't as great a problem as it first might seem.
For instance, the AC who replied before you talks about the retribution one might face from the boss for voting "the wrong way." But if your boss is intimidating you into voting a certain way, then isn't he also intimidating all your co-workers into voting the same way? And if all the votes are published, wouldn't it be easy to demonstrate then that your boss was engaging in felony conduct? All you'd have to do is show how everyone in your company voted the same way, something you wouldn't be able to do under the present system.
Which suggests to me that it is the present system that is the most susceptible to coercion and intimidation.
Most lay people assume the voting system is secure simply by virtue of it being computerized.
I haven't looked at the spec for this yet, but I have to believe that this cannot be the answer, simply because most people won't be able to understand how this system is any different than the (electronic) one it replaces.
More than anything else, voters have to be able to trust that their vote is being counted. And there will always be talk of powerful interests being given backdoors or being able to skew the results using exotic technologies like quantum cryptoanalysis.
The only sure way of a) having a legitimate election where b) everyone can know their vote was counted is by c) publishing all the votes.
Publish the votes. No batteries (cryptographic or otherwise) required.
...most certainly do not welcome our new Unicode-munging overlords.
I don't care what the issues are. I have had it up to HERE with charset issues! ENOUGH ALREADY!
If you can't do it using UTF-8, don't do it at all!
Dammit.
We're talking about a dumb terminal here, aren't we? Let the user login with his card, enter a passcode, then enter input which gets sent to a server somewhere to be processed and which sends back either output to be displayed to the user or output to be read by the machine which gives you your money.
The same criticism applies to Diebold's voting machines.
This is why Linux would be such an ideal solution. No application of Linux has impressed me more than the (now sadly defunct) Linux Router Project, simply because it demonstrated how for many tasks most of the operating system amounted to nothing more than ballast. They were able to boot a router from a floppy.
This is how I think an ATM--or a voting machine--should work. The amount of software should be kept to an absolute minimum if for no other reason than that it minimizes complexity, and in these kinds of applications, complexity is the mother of all evil.
And in the case of the voting machines, it would also greatly assist in auditing the code and making sure that what you think is executing is what's executing.
I get a 404.
If there are plenty of articles, you should be able to link to at least one.
(it's a shame this story got rejected by
But I do what you're talking about now.
:::groan:::
I see what you're talking about now, too.
Forgive my ignorance. I am new to Debian, having just been spurned by the people at Red Hat.
I see what you're saying, and while I would be happy with Jigdo, I would think that Debian and the mirrors would rather we use BitTorrent. It saves them bandwidth, and I get my ISO's without further fuss.
But I do what you're talking about now. Jigdo does seem very nice.
From the Debian website:
Debian would rather you didn't download the ISO's, in favor of Jigdo. However, I prefer ISO's. I live having the whole distro laid out in however many CD's it takes, so I don't have to worry about the network running or having everything I need to do the install.
Sometimes distros forget to include stuff you need in a specific package. Getting everything at once helps to preclude that inevitability.
So again I ask, who has the torrent?
The only way to be sure that your vote is recorded is by looking it up in a ledger somewhere or a newspaper that prints it or on a website that lists it.
Anything else is (and has been and will continue to be) subject to fraud.
Thank you for your support.
I've bookmarked both and will check them out ASAP. Thanks for the links.