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User: lawpoop

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  1. Re:It shouldn't only be about cost. on Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting · · Score: 1

    "If somebody wanted to fix the election by changing the recorded votes, though they might not change *your* vote, the odds that they select only votes that nobody checks is astronomically low thus making undetectable fixing impossible."

    The point that you're missing is the only vote that you can check is your own. In order to check any other vote that you'd be counting, you'd have to confirm with that voter that they actually voted that way. And if you're not a voter, but just checking, you can't check *any* vote. The only way to verify a vote other than your own is to say "Hey, is this really how you voted?" So the odds are about 100% that the votes they change are ones that you can't check.

    "The only method of fixing the election is to add extra fake votes..."

    Not true. You can fix an election by not counting verified votes in the official tally.

    You can verify your vote all you want, but you have no way of knowing that your vote is actually counted in the tally, unless you can specifically correlate a ballot in the public tally with your id. There are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of people who voted the exact same way you did. If you were naive, you might verify your vote, and then look for a ballot exactly like it in the tally. There are probably several, so you think that your vote is counted -- but it isn't. You are looking at the votes of other people, who voted the same way you did. Your vote isn't in the tally, and neither are several other people's who voted the same way.

    If there were a block of 50 people who voted exactly the same, the machine might only count 25. Maybe 40 people bother to verify their vote. They are all looking at the same 25 identical ballots, each thinking that one of them is theirs. But for 15 of those 40 verifiers, there vote isn't actually in the tally. The only way to know that your voted is being counted in the public tally is if you can match a verified vote to your id -- and then we have vote selling and voter intimidation.

    The solution to this I propose is a secure tallying system. Voting is basically giving a citizen the power to affect an election by exactly one vote, for each office and issue. This power to affect the election by exactly one vote must remain in the hands of the voter.

  2. Re:It shouldn't only be about cost. on Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting · · Score: 1

    Hey, *I* trust them, and they are good enough to challenge election results around the world, but the Faux News public knows that those pollsters are deliberately asking mostly liberals how they voted.

  3. Re:Second-class citizens are useful. on MySpace, U.S. Address Sex Offenders Online · · Score: 1

    " How else would we have had such a burgeoning entertainment industry, had it not been for laws that deprived actors and actresses from burial in sacred ground? "

    Uh, what?

    Are you saying we wouldn't have summer blockbuster movies and National Enquirer if people could wail and gnash their teeth at the tombs of ancient heroes, and listen to wandering minstrels recount tales of their strength and beauty in verse?

  4. Re:Secure tallying on Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting · · Score: 1

    Could your boss sit down with you and your peel-off, watch you log on to the website, and make sure that you voted the right way?

    Google didn't turn up any hits for the unquoted phrase "Chaum's peel-off ballot". Where can I learn more about it?

  5. Re:It shouldn't only be about cost. on Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting · · Score: 1

    No, the third point is dead-on. That's why it's so insidious; it's not obvious.

    Sure, the website will list all of the 'votes', and they will match with the tally. However, you don't know that *any* of those votes are valid. At most, you can only verify one, and that is your own. In order to double-check that any vote is correct, you would have to have someone say "Yup, that's who I voted for". And then, in order to count the whole election, you would have to have everyone confirm their vote to you.

    If you are a random person perusing the votes, attempting to tally them, you have no way of knowing whether or not the ballots you are looking at are legitimate ballots. All of the ballots you are looking at could be entirely fictitious. Even if a lot of people say "Yeah, I verified my vote, it's on there", the only way to really know that other people's ballots are being counted is to ask them how they voted and look for that ballot. And that's assuming that everyone is going to have a unique vote -- which they won't.

    The only thing you can know for certain is that the website has recorded *your* ballot correctly. You have no way of knowing if your ballot is affecting the tally. You have no way of verifying any other ballot that the website is reporting to you. Your ballot might be correct, but all of the others might be totally fraudulent. If you're not a voter, but just an anonymous tallier, you have no way of verifying *any* of the votes that the website is reporting to you.

    The only way to double-check the official tally is to have people who have verified their voters tell other people who they voted for -- and then you've blown the secret ballot.

    If the safety mechanism is that you verify your vote, then look for it in the tally, what happens when you don't find it? In order to do any kind checking into it, you would have to have people say "I couldn't find my vote", and then the question would be "tell us who you voted for so we can make sure that it's not there", and there goes the secret ballot. The whole election is blown and people have to say who they voted for.

  6. Re:Secure tallying on Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting · · Score: 1

    Yeah, that's a good point.

    Perhaps if your pool is that small, you don't need to report hourly. If you have 10 people voting in an hour, just report at the end of voting. However, if you have 300 people voting every hour, report every hour.

    Perhaps the trigger to publish the running tally is the number of people voting, instead of arbitrary time blocks.

  7. Re:It shouldn't only be about cost. on Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting · · Score: 1

    That's a good solution to the problems of vote-selling and voter intimidation, but again, the acts of casting a ballot and verifying it later on a website or by any other method *may not* have any bearing on the actual official tally. You can have all the three-ballot voting and online verification you want, but if the machines verify ballots correctly online but decide to ignore those verified ballots when it comes time to report the tally, you can have a stolen election.

    If you have a paper trail, that's good, but if there's no reason to question the official machine-reported tally, there's no reason to start counting the paper trail. Right now, I think the only evidence we would have to distrust the official tally (partisanship aside) are discrepancies between exit polls and the official results, but nobody trusts exit polls :(

  8. Re:It shouldn't only be about cost. on Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting · · Score: 2, Interesting
    There are three problems with logging online to see who you voted for:
    1. You could sell your vote, and use the website to verify it to the purchaser.
    2. Your boss or someone else could intimidate you into voting a certain way, and you would keep your job by showing your boss how you voted on the website
    3. The fact that you cast a ballot and your receipt number shows a certain vote on a website may have nothing at all to do with the official tally.
    See this post for my solution..
  9. Secure tallying on Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't think the solution to current-day voting machine problems are a more secure way of voting. I think what we need is secure tallying.

    Whatever scheme we dream up, such as punch-card voting, or a paper trail, the fact remains that we really don't know whether our vote will affect the *tally*. A paper trail only comes into play when the official tally is suspect for some reason. What we really need to know is that our vote is counted. Even if we have a bar-code on a paper receipt that shows exactly who we voted for, we have no way of knowing whether or not our little bar-code verified data gets in to the official tally.

    Here's what I wrote the last time this discussion came up on slashdot:
    "What I'm envisioning is some kind of method where votes can be tallied, and the running tally can be periodically published during the count. I imagine it would have some kind of hashing technology, like PGP, where tallies are perhaps encoded in a string, and the string is published. The hashing token, or whatever mechanism allowed a vote to be legitimately added to the tally, would be passed from one voter to another, after they voted. This puts the power to count votes into the hand of the voters, rather than a poorly-trained election volunteer, a partisan, or a hackable machine. Because of the constraints of the token and hashing, a voter can only vote as they are allowed, without destroying the tally hash string."

    One problem with secure tallying is that you want to make sure that your vote is counted in the official tally, but you don't want others to deduce how you voted from the official tally. At this point, I imagine one voter passing the official tally to the next voter. That way you can be certain you have affected the tally, and the design of the system constrains you to only one vote. Periodically, perhaps every hour, the official tally is publicly released. Nobody can then figure out how you voted; they only know how the crowd voted in the past hour.

    To satisfy the choke point of one voter passing the official tally to the next person, there can be multiple official tallies that are running concurrently, and at the end of voting, they are all added together in a master tally.

  10. Re:Are we sure it comes from work? on Understanding Burnout · · Score: 1

    There is a great deal that each can learn from the other, but unfortunately, most people who are interested in discussing the religion are only interested in convincing/converting the other party, not learning. When you get two people like that, you have a fight. When you get one person like that, you have a zealot talking with someone who doesn't care about religion, or someone who doesn't want to be converted.

    It's a rare person who takes their religion seriously, is interested in discussing it, and also wants to take the other perspective seriously meets the same type of person.

  11. Re:Are we sure it comes from work? on Understanding Burnout · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "I don't discuss business or politics or religion with my real friends and family -- instead we talk about reality, the now, the past."

    "Why would you want to do that? Those are the people you're SUPPOSED to discuss those things with."

    I disagree. Usually politics, unless they are the most local of politics, and religion are the most abstracted aspects of your life. Federal funding of whatever program or the existence of your soul will not change a damn thing in your life. Take one person who is a conservative Christian and another who is a liberal Buddhist. They might have the same background, education, and interests -- practically identical lives -- and be best of friends, but if they ever discussed politics or religion they would soon get into a heated argument, could not agree on anything, and generally invest a lot of energy into something that had zero impact on their lives.

    What GP is saying that he doesn't bother to discuss things that are totally abstract, irrelevant, and inapplicable to their everyday life, and instead discuss things that can actually have an impact their everyday life.

  12. Re:Whatever means necessary? on The DOJ's New Spin on Blocking Software · · Score: 1

    Yes, such testimony can be brought up later in a trial, but isn't the obvious counter to that "Your honor, we were only arguing about the effectiveness of software-blocking over COPA, not generally advocating a pro-software blocking stance. Testimony from that trial has nothing to do with the issues before us in this case."

  13. Whatever means necessary? on The DOJ's New Spin on Blocking Software · · Score: 1

    Could it be that the ACLU is using this argument just to win this case? That they are only arguing for software blocking just to defeat COPA?

    The submitter talks about flip-flopping, both on the side of the DOJ and the ACLU, but arguments you made in other court cases can't be brought up in later court cases, can they? I mean, the judge doesn't rule against you for flip-flopping, right? You base an argument on the facts of this case and this case alone? Even if the DOJ faces off down the road against the ACLU in a software-blocking case, and the DOJ argues that the ACLU was for software-blocking in the past, the ACLU can say "Your honor, that was in a different case with different circumstances. We were arguing for the effectiveness of software blocking *over* COPA".

  14. Re:Communism or Socialism on Richest 2% Own Half the World's Wealth · · Score: 1

    What's interesting about Finland is that it is what most Americans would consider to be almost totally communist -- with its high tax rate, socialized medicine, housing, and education. Yet the World Economic Forum listed Finland as the world's most competitive economy.

    These facts explode the myth of the American right wing that any kind of social program will cause people to be lazy and watch TV all day instead of going to work. In reality, social programs improve the productivity of the work force.

  15. Re:Ohio story on A Spaceport In Ohio? · · Score: 1

    Son of a b*tch.

  16. Re:Ohio story on A Spaceport In Ohio? · · Score: 2

    Nice!!1!!

    Go Bucks!!!

  17. Ohio story on A Spaceport In Ohio? · · Score: 4, Funny
    As an Ohioan, let me relay this narrative to you:
    • The Wright brothers, who developed and flew the first airplane, were from Ohio.
    • John Glenn, the first man in orbit, is an Ohioan.
    • Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, is an Ohioan.
    • Now, they are talking about building a spaceport in Ohio.
    It just shows what length men will go to to get the hell out of Ohio!
  18. Re:Punchscan.org on NIST Condemns Paperless Electronic Voting · · Score: 1

    Hm, I wish the slide show did a better job of explaining that. It wasn't clear.

  19. Re:No score for you, but contractors can! on Homeland Security Tracks Information of Travelers · · Score: 1

    Not that I would condone this type of activity, but maybe some unscrupulous hackers would electronically steal that information from some poorly-secured contractor's network, and share it with the rest of the world. That would be really awful and only support terrorists, so I hope it doesn't happen.

  20. Re:Punchscan.org on NIST Condemns Paperless Electronic Voting · · Score: 1

    The 15-second video seems to indicate that I can use punchscan technology to see which way I voted after the election. What's to prevent me from selling my vote, or my boss intimidating me to vote a certain way?

  21. Re:Security through obscurity is no security at al on Fighting Claims That Open Source Is Insecure? · · Score: 1

    This sounds like a typical geek answer that sounds ridiculous to a non-geek.

    "We brought this guy in here to discuss the security of our software, and now he's ranting about the government!?"

  22. Re:Who is helping the Chinese government censor? on Psiphon Now Available For Download · · Score: 1

    "Oh knock it off with the "EVIL CORPORATIONS!!! EVIL UNITED STATES!!!". You know if the U.S. declared a technology embargo to China, self rightous dweebs like yourself would be all up in arms that "Corporations are trying to intimidate the soveriegn nation of China and undermine socialism", just like you already do with Cuba!"

    Nice strawman. You have no idea whether or not GP is pro-socialist, or against the Cuban embargo. I haven't heard *anybody* advocating a US government embargo of China.

    What I have heard are people advocating a free market response to China -- criticizing and boycotting the companies who choose to do business with China and capitulate to their totalitarian tactics.

  23. Re:Yikes! on Psiphon Now Available For Download · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I heard an interview on NPR last night with one of the Professors who was involved with the creation of this software. The idea behind it is that it is to be used in a web of trust, not with random strangers. So if you're mainland Chinese and you have a cousin in the US, you let him provide you the connection. Don't leave it up to strangers to provide you the connection.

  24. Re:Dvorak... Reality... ??? on John Dvorak On Vista's Launch · · Score: 3, Funny

    In that very like that you gave above, Dvorak claims that a WinXP patch causes traceroute to die after three hops:

    "TRACEROUTE NOT WORKING. Traceroute, or TRACERT on my machine, now goes three hops and times out. I can't trace anything."

    This guy is like a tech support troll. "That patch you installed killed my mouse! Get down here and fix it!"

  25. Re:What the Program Actually Is on Justice Department To Review Domestic Spying · · Score: 1

    " There are certainly cells here, and they are hopefully being monitored - but until you get some evidence that it's without warrants, then it's merely a conspiracy theory. Now, if someone presents some actual evidence, then it's a different story, and no, I wouldn't rely on the government for that - it was the New York Times that spilled the beans on the wiretapping"

    You have a classic case of nerdism. You're going for form over reality. You are taking this opportunity to give patronizing lessons in logic when our liberty and form of government are being threatened.

    Yes, it technically is a conspiracy theory to claim that our government is tapping our phones. We have no evidence. How would we get that evidence? Should journalist or the government investigate and see if the government is listening without warrants? If so, why should they follow up some loony conspiracy theory? They might as well investigate the Air Force covering up an extra-terrestrial saucer crash in Roswell.

    You see, you are correct in the technical sense when you say this is merely a conspiracy theory. However, the political implication of using the phrase 'conspiracy theory' means that whatever the claim is, it is totally batshit crazy, on the level of space aliens or Loch Ness monsters. The reality is that there is a real danger that parts of our government are breaking the law, and we need to take it seriously. When you call it a 'conspiracy theory', you are technically correct, but the implication of what you are saying is "this is totally crazy, ignore whoever says this because they have lost their mind, and don't follow up on this issue any more".

    You have no evidence that there are Al Qaida cells operating in the US. You merely have the word of the government or the media. You don't have any independently verifiable, concrete evidence. All we have to rely on is someone's word. Neither you nor I will never, *ever*, get to see the evidence, question the accused or the witnesses. The scientific method is unavailable to us in this situation.

    Simply asking questions is not enough. People can ask all the questions they want. Wrongdoers will never give you truthful answers. Without the power to investigate, we will never find out the truth. Seymore Hersh didn't get his information from asking questions; he was given information from insiders who had inside knowledge and approached *him*. They risked their livelihood and career, possibly even their life to bring him this information. This is, after all, a matter of national security.