The article has nothing to do with online voting. It is talking about more secure and verifiable systems than are currently used at polling stations.
Which is a fair point, but raises others.
1) What is the problem we're trying to solve here? In most functional democracies, votes are easily verifiable through chain of custody either of paper votes themselves or paper audit trails.
2) Many of the same concerns still exist. If these devices record votes or verify voters, they need to be secured. That's something we've proved time and time again to be phenomenally difficult.
In general, we assume if a malicious actor had access to the physical device, security is by definition compromised. In other words, securely computerizing the polling booth is, to an extent, even more challenging than where you try to implement networked voting.
I've posted this before, but it's worth saying again.
In the early 2000s, there was a GNU project to build a secure online voting system. They ceased work in 2002, citing the project as being at best difficult and at worst, impossible. They quoted Bruce Schneier, one of the foremost experts in computer security as saying "a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers... [B]uilding a secure Internet-based voting system is a very hard problem, harder than all the other computer security problems we've attempted and failed at. I believe that the risks to democacy are too great to attempt it."
I see no evidence that Schneier has changed his mind or that any other comparably qualified expert has suggested he's wrong.
So you expect a company maintain a storefront, hire employees, comply with medical regulations and keeps lights on for a product you buy every couple years for $60. Spiffy.
That would be somewhere in the region of what typical glasses in the UK would cost from a store like Specsavers. Mind you, you could pick up a pair of single vision glasses there for 25GBP or about $33. Pretty sure there s VAT (sales tax) of 20% on eyeglasses, so those prices already incorporate that additional cost.
Never heard of it, and the short description here doesn't inspire me to look into it.
/. - news for nerds.
Seriously, this was all over the technical and traditional news a year ago. AI reservations at places like restaurants made by a scarily realistic human-sounding voice.
I'm not sure it's unreasonable for a tech news site to expect a little familiarity from their audience.
Fortune.com reported over 700 million iPhones in use in 2017 with an expected billion within a few years.
If only a tenth of one percent of those iPhones were owned by someone who uses Linux on their desktop. you have a million folk impacted.
Sure, Linux is a niche, but when you're the size of Apple, even small percentages quickly become big numbers. Let's be conservative ans say just 20% of Linux users buy their iPhone new - that still points to 140 million in revenue, not including any app store sales.
I'm guessing you've never actually used PACER. Nothing is self-explanatory. The interface is tiresome and unfriendly - mostly because of the need to hide results until the user agrees to pay (unless you're making a search in which case you're paying for the number of pages needed to display your results).
Remember, the electronic docket is needed by the parties to the case. They already paid filing fees for everything they submitted. If those fees don't cover the cost of an electronic docket, maybe they need to be increased. Most filings are electronic, so there's little need for human intervention like scanning and uploading.
I'm not going to dispute that there's a need to maintain servers and run a helpdesk. However, I'm not convinced that the $60 million/year revenue from PACER on top of the court filing fees is necessary to build a simple document search and retrieval site.
I think for both Facebook and Google, enterprise certs will be restored at some point - maybe Apple is going to do a review of all the apps signed with them and devices they are installed on before restoring.
Isn't it a message to every enterprise everywhere that Apple are in total control of your platform and can disable your work without notice or warning, rendering any investment you made worthless?
If I were a corporation looking to deploy an internal app, I'd be looking at non-apple options. Having your internal platform disabled could cripple smaller business to the point of threatening their viability.
And if I were Google, I'd be relaxed to see Apple making that point so effectively.
The receipt needs to come in human readable and a structured machine readable format.
If we had apps that could analyze everything we buy - especially if we had anonymous price sharing - we could then have apps that tell you where to shop to minimize cost.
Imagine an app that says " here's your typical weekly shop". You should buy it from Acme this week. With the option to add things you buy less regularly and then get updated advice on which nearby shop is best value.
It seems like the inevitable fate of any successful product. Wall St demands higher and higher profits, so there is no choice but to keep adding and pushing, even beyond what makes sense. Then the product inevitably becomes so bloated that people only tolerate it until a simpler alternative comes along. Then that becomes successful and the cycle continues...
Before responding like this, why are we even accepting the premise without testing?
I just tested. I opened Google Maps (not already running) on my phone. I searched for somewhere random (US Courthouse). I selected a court from the four options and clicked the icon for directions. I had directions on screen in about 20 seconds from my click to launch the app. I didn't need any unnecessary clicks.
Maybe, since he mentions cross streets, the author is talking about when you search for a place but know you really want to navigate nearby, not to their door. That took me about 35 seconds starting Maps from scratch. You search for your destination, zoom in at the destination to see where you might really want to drive to. Delete the destination and select "Choose from map" and now you can navigate to wherever you place the pin.
So that's not quite as straightforward, but still it's no where near several minutes. It could do the initial zoom for you, but that would be at the expense of showing you the planned route and alternate routes which, I think, are more useful more frequently.
Of course none of this is as simple as using the Google Assistant and saying "Hey Google, directions to the United States District Court". which gets me directions in under fifteen seconds with no clicks and a read out of the preferred major road together with an estimated duration.
Now it's fair to ask whether Maps is becoming too bloated,, but I don't see any evidence bloat is making it harder to get directions.
What are we supposed to make of this credential? Ex Apple engineer makes new sweatshirt, Ex Google engineer makes new ice cream scoop.
If you're fired from Silicon Valley, is the next move to make anything, advertise it online and describe as having been invented by an ex big-tech engineer?
They assumed a 45-year career working 250 days a year
So, 365 days in a year, less 104 weekend days leaves just 261 days.
We then have holidays - most folk get off (either on the day or in lieu) New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
That puts as to 255 days available to work. In other words, the analysis reckons the average person will take five workdays total for vacation and sick time in an entire year.
And they think it's the commute time to be concerned about!
Let's think about what Epic were asking for. They'd prefer users not be notified of a critical vulnerability for three months and instead just wait to see how many upgrade naturally.
Google on the other hand have a published policy that they will notify of security events after 90 days if un-patched or after a patch is widely available, exactly what happened here.
While Google does have a strong financial incentive to stop other companies from operating outside the play store, they also have an incentive for Android not to be viewed as a less secure mobile operating system. It seems to me that, if you want to encourage security patches to be applied, you would want to let users know that their existing install has a critical vulnerability. Why Epic would prefer silence can be inferred, but it's not to the benefit of their customers.
No, don't start trying to school me on network monitoring. I get that the device can't know it's being monitored if you do it right. But what it could do is send captured voice traffic at a later time, or during a period of time when you know it's supposed to be sending traffic. You know, unless your super sleuth skills allow you to decrypt what it sends and all.
What it cannot do is send voice without using data. And voice data, even compressed, is pretty large. More than enough to be noticeable. In a home with music, kids and pets, daytime noise is almost constant. The actual volume of data would be huge if it was transferring everything it heard. And there's no way it's powerful enough to filter out background and only transmit relevant communications.
A 48kbps audio stream over a month would take about 15GB. It's easy to see if a device transmits even a hundredth of that. Place a Google Home next to a TV playing CNN 24/7 and it doesn't suddenly start transmitting 15GB per month.
As I said in my original post, it is easy to confirm that a Google Home or an Amazon Echo does not record/transmit everything it hears unless it's broken.
Why do we have these blatant untruths? Sure, these devices listen all the time - for a wake word. The idea that they're always listening to your conversation and always recording are patently false. My network usage confirms this. Unless Google and Amazon are shipping these with LTE modems and are paying for the bandwidth requirements of uploading tens of millions of simultaneous audio streams?
selling the high defect ones to other camera companies
Any evidence for this? There's a big difference between keeping a design exclusive and selling inferior or faulty goods. I can't imagine for a second that the likes of Nikon would accept high defect CCDs.
Indeed. My fifteen year old Canon 10D with a $50 50mm prime lens will take better photos than pretty much any cell phone camera available today. That said, I'm not likely to take the Canon to the pub, so there's a role for both.
Your article is about 4 years and $26 per hour out of date
We should note though that the $50+ figure is based on limited hours. If we're comparing it with other jobs, we'd want to compare against a 2080 hour work year which sees their pilots earning about $29/hour.
$29/hour for highly skilled employment with unsociable hours and lots of travel is not high. Add to that the very high training cost.
The only time you see secondary fermentation used in mass market is in specialty brews, cask festivals, and similar specialty beer types. Otherwise it's just too unpredictable.
You're not in the UK, are you? Real ale is pretty widely available, hand pumped from the cask and relies on secondary fermentation. In the US it's harder to find, but available in bars that specialize in that sort of thing.
By that rationale, there's almost no such thing as interstate commerce.
Not at all.
In fact today's decision if you read it has a pretty good breakdown on how this stuff applies in the taxation realm (which is slightly different to the plain jurisdictional one covered by international shoe and subsequent decisions). States can't use sales taxes to impede interstate commerce, punish an out of state vendor or favor an in-state one. But they can levy a sales tax and the decision makes clear that someone with sufficient minimum contacts in the state (I think S. Dakota required 200+ individual transactions or $100k in sales before being required to collect tax) can be responsible for collecting it.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is a fair point, but raises others.
1) What is the problem we're trying to solve here? In most functional democracies, votes are easily verifiable through chain of custody either of paper votes themselves or paper audit trails.
2) Many of the same concerns still exist. If these devices record votes or verify voters, they need to be secured. That's something we've proved time and time again to be phenomenally difficult.
In general, we assume if a malicious actor had access to the physical device, security is by definition compromised. In other words, securely computerizing the polling booth is, to an extent, even more challenging than where you try to implement networked voting.
I've posted this before, but it's worth saying again.
In the early 2000s, there was a GNU project to build a secure online voting system. They ceased work in 2002, citing the project as being at best difficult and at worst, impossible. They quoted Bruce Schneier, one of the foremost experts in computer security as saying "a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers... [B]uilding a secure Internet-based voting system is a very hard problem, harder than all the other computer security problems we've attempted and failed at. I believe that the risks to democacy are too great to attempt it."
I see no evidence that Schneier has changed his mind or that any other comparably qualified expert has suggested he's wrong.
That would be somewhere in the region of what typical glasses in the UK would cost from a store like Specsavers. Mind you, you could pick up a pair of single vision glasses there for 25GBP or about $33. Pretty sure there
s VAT (sales tax) of 20% on eyeglasses, so those prices already incorporate that additional cost.
Specsavers aren't owned by Luxotica. Neither is Vision Express or Boots Opticians or Optical Express.
I wonder, could the lower prices in the UK be somehow related to the existence of competition?
Seriously, this was all over the technical and traditional news a year ago. AI reservations at places like restaurants made by a scarily realistic human-sounding voice.
I'm not sure it's unreasonable for a tech news site to expect a little familiarity from their audience.
Fortune.com reported over 700 million iPhones in use in 2017 with an expected billion within a few years.
If only a tenth of one percent of those iPhones were owned by someone who uses Linux on their desktop. you have a million folk impacted.
Sure, Linux is a niche, but when you're the size of Apple, even small percentages quickly become big numbers. Let's be conservative ans say just 20% of Linux users buy their iPhone new - that still points to 140 million in revenue, not including any app store sales.
I'm guessing you've never actually used PACER. Nothing is self-explanatory. The interface is tiresome and unfriendly - mostly because of the need to hide results until the user agrees to pay (unless you're making a search in which case you're paying for the number of pages needed to display your results).
Remember, the electronic docket is needed by the parties to the case. They already paid filing fees for everything they submitted. If those fees don't cover the cost of an electronic docket, maybe they need to be increased. Most filings are electronic, so there's little need for human intervention like scanning and uploading.
I'm not going to dispute that there's a need to maintain servers and run a helpdesk. However, I'm not convinced that the $60 million/year revenue from PACER on top of the court filing fees is necessary to build a simple document search and retrieval site.
I'm not stupid enough to believe that companies the size of Google and Facebook don't have lawyers.
Nor am I stupid enough to think that companies that size would necessarily have agreed to the same terms as others.
And I'm not stupid enough to believe that a contract, even when drafted by expensive lawyers, can't have ambiguity.
So, perhaps, it's not me who's a special kind of stupid.
Isn't it a message to every enterprise everywhere that Apple are in total control of your platform and can disable your work without notice or warning, rendering any investment you made worthless?
If I were a corporation looking to deploy an internal app, I'd be looking at non-apple options. Having your internal platform disabled could cripple smaller business to the point of threatening their viability.
And if I were Google, I'd be relaxed to see Apple making that point so effectively.
The receipt needs to come in human readable and a structured machine readable format.
If we had apps that could analyze everything we buy - especially if we had anonymous price sharing - we could then have apps that tell you where to shop to minimize cost.
Imagine an app that says " here's your typical weekly shop". You should buy it from Acme this week. With the option to add things you buy less regularly and then get updated advice on which nearby shop is best value.
Honestly it looks like watching 480p upscaled.
Before responding like this, why are we even accepting the premise without testing?
I just tested. I opened Google Maps (not already running) on my phone. I searched for somewhere random (US Courthouse). I selected a court from the four options and clicked the icon for directions. I had directions on screen in about 20 seconds from my click to launch the app. I didn't need any unnecessary clicks.
Maybe, since he mentions cross streets, the author is talking about when you search for a place but know you really want to navigate nearby, not to their door. That took me about 35 seconds starting Maps from scratch. You search for your destination, zoom in at the destination to see where you might really want to drive to. Delete the destination and select "Choose from map" and now you can navigate to wherever you place the pin.
So that's not quite as straightforward, but still it's no where near several minutes. It could do the initial zoom for you, but that would be at the expense of showing you the planned route and alternate routes which, I think, are more useful more frequently.
Of course none of this is as simple as using the Google Assistant and saying "Hey Google, directions to the United States District Court". which gets me directions in under fifteen seconds with no clicks and a read out of the preferred major road together with an estimated duration.
Now it's fair to ask whether Maps is becoming too bloated,, but I don't see any evidence bloat is making it harder to get directions.
Really. I have chucked out four devices, each of which bootlooped and they were acquired over a period of about a year. All purchased from Google.
So, either Google were selling old faulty stock or this wasn't quickly fixed in production.
Or that they wanted payment in hard currency not cryptocoins?
What are we supposed to make of this credential? Ex Apple engineer makes new sweatshirt, Ex Google engineer makes new ice cream scoop.
If you're fired from Silicon Valley, is the next move to make anything, advertise it online and describe as having been invented by an ex big-tech engineer?
So, 365 days in a year, less 104 weekend days leaves just 261 days.
We then have holidays - most folk get off (either on the day or in lieu) New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
That puts as to 255 days available to work. In other words, the analysis reckons the average person will take five workdays total for vacation and sick time in an entire year.
And they think it's the commute time to be concerned about!
Let's think about what Epic were asking for. They'd prefer users not be notified of a critical vulnerability for three months and instead just wait to see how many upgrade naturally.
Google on the other hand have a published policy that they will notify of security events after 90 days if un-patched or after a patch is widely available, exactly what happened here.
While Google does have a strong financial incentive to stop other companies from operating outside the play store, they also have an incentive for Android not to be viewed as a less secure mobile operating system. It seems to me that, if you want to encourage security patches to be applied, you would want to let users know that their existing install has a critical vulnerability. Why Epic would prefer silence can be inferred, but it's not to the benefit of their customers.
What it cannot do is send voice without using data. And voice data, even compressed, is pretty large. More than enough to be noticeable. In a home with music, kids and pets, daytime noise is almost constant. The actual volume of data would be huge if it was transferring everything it heard. And there's no way it's powerful enough to filter out background and only transmit relevant communications.
A 48kbps audio stream over a month would take about 15GB. It's easy to see if a device transmits even a hundredth of that. Place a Google Home next to a TV playing CNN 24/7 and it doesn't suddenly start transmitting 15GB per month.
As I said in my original post, it is easy to confirm that a Google Home or an Amazon Echo does not record/transmit everything it hears unless it's broken.
Why do we have these blatant untruths? Sure, these devices listen all the time - for a wake word. The idea that they're always listening to your conversation and always recording are patently false. My network usage confirms this. Unless Google and Amazon are shipping these with LTE modems and are paying for the bandwidth requirements of uploading tens of millions of simultaneous audio streams?
Any evidence for this? There's a big difference between keeping a design exclusive and selling inferior or faulty goods. I can't imagine for a second that the likes of Nikon would accept high defect CCDs.
Indeed. My fifteen year old Canon 10D with a $50 50mm prime lens will take better photos than pretty much any cell phone camera available today. That said, I'm not likely to take the Canon to the pub, so there's a role for both.
We should note though that the $50+ figure is based on limited hours. If we're comparing it with other jobs, we'd want to compare against a 2080 hour work year which sees their pilots earning about $29/hour.
$29/hour for highly skilled employment with unsociable hours and lots of travel is not high. Add to that the very high training cost.
I really like these, also a bit more expensive, but which have a passthrough outlet.
You're not in the UK, are you? Real ale is pretty widely available, hand pumped from the cask and relies on secondary fermentation. In the US it's harder to find, but available in bars that specialize in that sort of thing.
Not at all.
In fact today's decision if you read it has a pretty good breakdown on how this stuff applies in the taxation realm (which is slightly different to the plain jurisdictional one covered by international shoe and subsequent decisions). States can't use sales taxes to impede interstate commerce, punish an out of state vendor or favor an in-state one. But they can levy a sales tax and the decision makes clear that someone with sufficient minimum contacts in the state (I think S. Dakota required 200+ individual transactions or $100k in sales before being required to collect tax) can be responsible for collecting it.
I'm guessing that you only play a lawyer when you're on the internet? It has long been the case that a corporation not located in a state can be subjected to that state's jurisdiction based on a minimum contacts test.