Re:Electronic Voting already exists and works
on
Cringley on E-voting
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Even better, if you do something wrong (such as vote for 2 candidates, or miss the fill in area) the voting card validation box spits it back at you so you can try again. It protect the voter against mistakes.
Yeah, great, except every HomeXP user is root by default. Obviously the TCPIP stuff has to be able to come and go from somewhere. But why hand out the ability to forge headers to any app that wants it?
I didn't use active desktop. I never turned it on. I did a lot of turning off of things I could get at, but the packet leakage continued.
As for exposing the raw sockets in the API, a first in XP, you haven't given me a clue as to why they wanted to expose that. I suppose that it is to go around firewalls such as ZoneAlarm, but I can't prove it.
Without digging into the registry, the tech might happen to mention Ad-Aware as an option. It is not complete, but it is easy to use and fairly safe. It's a good start, anyway.
I was running Windows ME, and had put in Opera as my default browser. I then got ZoneAlarm Pro, and proceded to disallow all the IE components and DLL's I could. My system kept trying to "call out" whenever I was online. This was not automatic update. I never figured out what was going out. I got tired of watching it and just put on permanent deny. The newer versions of ZoneAlarm Pro allowed a lot of those by default. By then I was ready to switch to Linux anyway.
Even if you don't believe my story, you have to wonder why XP has added raw socket access to the OS's API.
It really depends on what you want to do. Samll changes that you need for special things that you (or your company) are doing don't need a lot of work. Sure, if you're not an expert, you should hire somebody. But I can tell you that a company that I worked for got hit by a Windows version upgrade that made an old API call that we were using leak. Most people didn't use this call much, while we used it a lot, and because of this the whole box would go down running our stuff. We had paid for Microsoft support (pretty expensive too) and after documenting the problem enough to them, MS said "Yup, that a problem alright." They said there were no plans to fix the leak, and we were stuck on our own. We had to completely change our approach to adapt to their bug.
While I can't be certain, I feel it is really likely we could have gotten the same isolated bug fixed in-house if we had had access to the source code.
Microsoft has released service packs that kill peoples applications, so much so that they have had to remove the service pack and put in a differnt one to patch the broken patch. Even Microsoft can't check the way everything works with everything.
The big differnce is that with open software, you can patch it yourself, or hire somebody to patch it for you. With MS, you can't patch it, and unless it effects enough people, you can't get MS to patch it either.
You can get a piece of a meteorite with these pre-solar grains (diamonds)
here. Here is a little more explaination about them, and the meteorites that have them, sorry it is a bit dry!:-) These are the most ancient intact objects ever found.
That's an interesting story, but you've been given a version with a strange spin on it. The moon rock was given by Nixon, not to the country but to a military dictator the US supported, Gen. Osvaldo Lopez Arellano. That dictator didn't recogize it as being valuable, and gave it to one of his colonels. There it sat, in private hands, until a US business man, Alan Rosen, started snooping around. He eventually found the owner, and bought the rock for $50,000. He was pretty surprised to find out when he took the rock in to be viewed by a potential buyer that it was to be confiscated.
You can read about it in some detail here and here.
GO to the chart at the bottom of the article. The movies BLADE RUNNER (1982), SCREAMERS (1996), IMPOSTOR (2002), MINORITY REPORT (2002) had a total gross of over $170,000,000.
PKD got paid under $2,000 for all these combined. That's a 0.001% slice of the gross!
Compared with a PROPERLY done purely electronic system, having paper involved is
#1 less accurate
#2 less immediate
#3 MORE inviting of fraud
#4 MORE expensive
These features are integral to the system.
Let's look at these claims.
#1 How can punching a button on a screen be any more accurate than conpleteting an arrow on a card, when the card is then verified before being accepted?
#2 The vote being immediate is a plus for electronic voting only if you are interested in getting the answer fast over getting it right. The results of the voting are rightfully withheld in many cases anyway. Waiting a few hours after poll closing is fine with me.
#3 Paper ballots will always be harder to use for fraud than an electronic system. There is real paper involved that must be marked and moved. Individual sheets must come from somewhere. They can be recounted, by hand or by machine. A thousand sheets all the same with be suspicious, while adding 1345 to some total will not be detectable.
#4 The paper system we use in Wisconsin has one ballot verifying machine per precinct, each voting booth is just a folding table with a curtain. This solution is much cheaper than computers, with no problem with lightning (Oops!), tripping on cords, or whatever. No "live updates" needed for security, either.
You're demanding that we unnecessarily include humans in the loop, instead of having them simply stand aside and monitor it.
Humans are in the loop, either way. They better be, they are the ones voting. With computers, humans also have to be involved in writing the voting code, and hopefully reviewing that code in public.
Yes, the key here is "properly implemented" electronic systems, but then again these are not hugely difficult engineering problems. So long as the states actually bother asking for the proper implementations, they'll get them.
How many state and federally designed systems do you know that work well? It's better to have a system where you can't just edit the total.
Try searching on "linux windows" "suse windows" and "redhat windows". For "linux windows" you get 16 results, as per the article. For "suse windows" you get almost a half million. For "redhat windows" you get almost the same. So, Microsoft must love SuSE?
In a world that has been shown to have people willing to cheat, the only way to have trust in any system is to have openness. Show me what you've got, don't expect me to believe somebody or thing I don't even know. Show me how it works. Let me take it to my experts, and have them check it for me.
I favor the paper ballot, as used here in Wisconsin. Here each voting station is just a small folding table with a curtain, and a magic marker. (Very cheap per station, never goes down, never needs a reboot.) You vote by completing a broken arrow to your choice with the magic marker. The ballot is verified by a testing box on the way out. If the ballot is readable, then it is accepted into a bin for later counting. If it is improperly marked, for example double voting for an office, it beeps and spits it back at you. You get a fresh ballot, and you can try again. The ballots can then be machine counted with knowledge that they will count right, and if human review is desired, you can manually go back through the ballots at any time. Cheep, effective, and reliable.
If all this is depressing you, check out Flak for a lift.
Because they are leveraging a monopoly in one area (operating systems) to get footing in a new area (media palyers) by bundling their player with their operating system. It is a no-no.
I think you are missing the point that many intrinsic parts of programming are hard to learn. Some people will never get recursion. Some types of tasks cannot be done reasonably without recursion. So, I claim, some people will never be able to do some kinds of programming.
Another problem is that English and other natural languages are terribly vague.
Human: "Computer, add the first 50 numbers". Computer: "Should I start with 0?"
Human: "Of course not, 0 is not a number!" Computer: "Hokay, if you say so. Done."
Human: "Well, where's the answer?"
Computer: "What answer?"
and so on...
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Even better, if you do something wrong (such as vote for 2 candidates, or miss the fill in area) the voting card validation box spits it back at you so you can try again. It protect the voter against mistakes.
That's a gneiss joke.
Yeah, great, except every HomeXP user is root by default. Obviously the TCPIP stuff has to be able to come and go from somewhere. But why hand out the ability to forge headers to any app that wants it?
Using raw sockets has to be done at some level. Exposing them in the OS's standard API is another thing.
I didn't use active desktop. I never turned it on. I did a lot of turning off of things I could get at, but the packet leakage continued.
As for exposing the raw sockets in the API, a first in XP, you haven't given me a clue as to why they wanted to expose that. I suppose that it is to go around firewalls such as ZoneAlarm, but I can't prove it.
Without digging into the registry, the tech might happen to mention Ad-Aware as an option. It is not complete, but it is easy to use and fairly safe. It's a good start, anyway.
I was running Windows ME, and had put in Opera as my default browser. I then got ZoneAlarm Pro, and proceded to disallow all the IE components and DLL's I could. My system kept trying to "call out" whenever I was online. This was not automatic update. I never figured out what was going out. I got tired of watching it and just put on permanent deny. The newer versions of ZoneAlarm Pro allowed a lot of those by default. By then I was ready to switch to Linux anyway.
Even if you don't believe my story, you have to wonder why XP has added raw socket access to the OS's API.It really depends on what you want to do. Samll changes that you need for special things that you (or your company) are doing don't need a lot of work. Sure, if you're not an expert, you should hire somebody. But I can tell you that a company that I worked for got hit by a Windows version upgrade that made an old API call that we were using leak. Most people didn't use this call much, while we used it a lot, and because of this the whole box would go down running our stuff. We had paid for Microsoft support (pretty expensive too) and after documenting the problem enough to them, MS said "Yup, that a problem alright." They said there were no plans to fix the leak, and we were stuck on our own. We had to completely change our approach to adapt to their bug.
While I can't be certain, I feel it is really likely we could have gotten the same isolated bug fixed in-house if we had had access to the source code.
Microsoft has released service packs that kill peoples applications, so much so that they have had to remove the service pack and put in a differnt one to patch the broken patch. Even Microsoft can't check the way everything works with everything.
The big differnce is that with open software, you can patch it yourself, or hire somebody to patch it for you. With MS, you can't patch it, and unless it effects enough people, you can't get MS to patch it either.
You can get a piece of a meteorite with these pre-solar grains (diamonds) here. Here is a little more explaination about them, and the meteorites that have them, sorry it is a bit dry! :-) These are the most ancient intact objects ever found.
That's an interesting story, but you've been given a version with a strange spin on it. The moon rock was given by Nixon, not to the country but to a military dictator the US supported, Gen. Osvaldo Lopez Arellano. That dictator didn't recogize it as being valuable, and gave it to one of his colonels. There it sat, in private hands, until a US business man, Alan Rosen, started snooping around. He eventually found the owner, and bought the rock for $50,000. He was pretty surprised to find out when he took the rock in to be viewed by a potential buyer that it was to be confiscated. You can read about it in some detail here and here.
eh fewer come pewter ill iterate, wywoo dewey vanwan tab log?
GO to the chart at the bottom of the article. The movies BLADE RUNNER (1982), SCREAMERS (1996), IMPOSTOR (2002), MINORITY REPORT (2002) had a total gross of over $170,000,000.
PKD got paid under $2,000 for all these combined. That's a 0.001% slice of the gross!
Let's look at these claims.
Humans are in the loop, either way. They better be, they are the ones voting. With computers, humans also have to be involved in writing the voting code, and hopefully reviewing that code in public.
How many state and federally designed systems do you know that work well? It's better to have a system where you can't just edit the total.
I added the restriction because the topic is "Top 10 Personal Computers", if you will check above.
It would be nice if you would name the first home computer to do these things as you remeber it.
Ok, I'll bite. How much money did they save by pulling the plug?
Perhaps you meant 30Hz? Nerve impulses travel at closer to the speed of sound than the speed of light.
If a having a soul is what lets a human win, then it appears only one person on the planet has a soul.
Try searching on "linux windows" "suse windows" and "redhat windows". For "linux windows" you get 16 results, as per the article. For "suse windows" you get almost a half million. For "redhat windows" you get almost the same. So, Microsoft must love SuSE?
In a world that has been shown to have people willing to cheat, the only way to have trust in any system is to have openness. Show me what you've got, don't expect me to believe somebody or thing I don't even know. Show me how it works. Let me take it to my experts, and have them check it for me.
I favor the paper ballot, as used here in Wisconsin. Here each voting station is just a small folding table with a curtain, and a magic marker. (Very cheap per station, never goes down, never needs a reboot.) You vote by completing a broken arrow to your choice with the magic marker. The ballot is verified by a testing box on the way out. If the ballot is readable, then it is accepted into a bin for later counting. If it is improperly marked, for example double voting for an office, it beeps and spits it back at you. You get a fresh ballot, and you can try again. The ballots can then be machine counted with knowledge that they will count right, and if human review is desired, you can manually go back through the ballots at any time. Cheep, effective, and reliable.
If all this is depressing you, check out Flak for a lift.
Dos Apple OS have a 90% market share? There you go, you've got it now!
Because they are leveraging a monopoly in one area (operating systems) to get footing in a new area (media palyers) by bundling their player with their operating system. It is a no-no.
They say it was the hand that Wild Bill Hickock was holding when he was shot in the back of the head.
I think you are missing the point that many intrinsic parts of programming are hard to learn. Some people will never get recursion. Some types of tasks cannot be done reasonably without recursion. So, I claim, some people will never be able to do some kinds of programming.
Another problem is that English and other natural languages are terribly vague.
Human: "Computer, add the first 50 numbers".
Computer: "Should I start with 0?"
Human: "Of course not, 0 is not a number!"
Computer: "Hokay, if you say so. Done."
Human: "Well, where's the answer?"
Computer: "What answer?"
and so on...