Ok, once again I don't disagree with how well paper trail works. I'm saying that there are other ways to ensure database tampering doesn't happen, as was in your original post.
As for recording wrong votes, you're making some assumptions that the created paper would be error free.
For instance, lets say you are voting for the new president and choose Bob. The computer records this to the db and prints out a record. The db says Bob, the paper, in English says Bob but the computer readable code on the paper says Joe.
As an aside, consider that I can print out several Joe votes and stuff them into a container and complain that the system has been hacked. If the system were open source, this would be easier to do wouldn't it?
Regardless, it is inevitable that the paper trail will no longer be a useful method for auditing. It barely works now as a main method given the vast number of votes to count. And it's also not the favored method of voting by trees.
I think that there are other auditing methods that people often forget.
Electronic auditing has the benefit of using encryption and redundant remote storage locations.
For example:
Take a series of 1000 votes and run MD5 against them to get a unique id. I send that id to 3 remote servers over encrypted channels where they are then written, encrypted, to the filesystem.
Repeat this for all votes.
Now when counting or recounting is done the votes are checked against the remote MD5 values to ensure that no changes have occured.
You can be as vigilant as you want adding more remote servers and increasing encryption as long as the hardware supports it.
I agree that a paper trail is a fine method of auditing but with some thought there are other ways to ensure every vote gets counted.
Well let me help ease your mind. Canadians, overall, and with exceptionally few exceptions, do not like or personally promote prison rape. And, although this is only personal opinion, I would not like it if anyone, personally or through some agency, did. Those who I've asked recently appear to agree with me. So rest assured that a pro prison-rape attitude is not a commonly shared opinion amongst Canadians. Whomever made that commercial should be deported, but once again, that's just my opinion. To sum it up, prison rape is very bad.
Also, I think you will be glad to know, that there are many Canadians who believe in ideas such as privatizing healthcare, changing the way that employment insurance and welfare work, and many other facets of how our government runs. I'm sure I could introduce you to a large group of social safety net hating Canadians as well. All opinions welcome, that's what makes democracy work. Vive le difference!
I can also introduce you to people born in many other countries who are new Canadians who have a whole slew of differing and opposing ideas. I've even managed to find people born in Canada with all sorts of strange variations on life. I'm sure I could find some people who live in Canada you would find less despicable than you may think. I am surprised daily how many people fall under the not-as-despicable-as-I-would-guess-they-would-be category.
But maybe I'm wasting my time. You've surely already made up your mind. Well informed with no need to reinvestigate your generalization.
I see that no other poster has seen these commercials so I have to question the validity of your statements.
I also see that you have an especially skewed opinion of the country you live in. I've got to warn you that no matter what country you live in, there is no perfect world. In time you may realize this. The U.S. is a fine country but has many of the ills of the country you love to bash. Country borders are blind to crime and violence. Your disdain for Canada may be displaced disdain for human imperfection.
Back to this post, I have no idea where your ads on American example came from but it's in very bad taste, even if you are just trying to make a point.
You point out that racial discrimination is bad, work-pay discrimination is bad, then you post in another reply:
Canadians are, on the whole, the vilest people I have encountered -- the exceptions are rare indeed.
Check out an online dictionary for a definition of discrimination...
Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit; partiality or prejudice: racial discrimination; discrimination against foreigners.
As insightful as your post may seem, it's also wrong. The same law exists under the Canadian Bill of Rights.
In addition I've never seen those commercials but assuming they exist, the people who make anti-drunk driving ads are not the same who control the penal system.
Finally, you may boast of being more civilized but most Canadians don't. Most Canadians as I would guess most Americans don't walk around with a moral scorecard. We've got better things to do.
That depends on whether the virus writer has friends who could use $250k.:)
Actually wont' all this do is that, in the future, the virus writing will be done by the "professional" types
You're assuming that by eliminating the newbies that the professionals will be created. There's no supply/demand influence in this case. The fact is at this very moment both types are creating virii. The newbs will be easier to catch for sure, but there always a chance that a more professional and more detrimental writer will get caught too.
A patent is easy to get considering that the burden of proof depends partly on the party filing. Along with the research done by the patent office, which takes a long time, the patent filer is supposed to, for their own sake, research for prior art, etc. I've been schooled on this by another slashdot user on the topic of how many ways there are to bust a patent.
What if there was a Software Development Artists Association that ran rampant throughout the US finding people who shared the applications and sued them? Would/. be as quick to scorn that action? Would we say "Heck with SDAA, we shouldn't pay for software from large companies." Wouldn't that affect a significant percentage of the people using this site?
I know I don't like the idea of the code I write for the company that pays me being used without compensation. If you don't want to pay, there are Open Source alternatives. We should consider that if we don't want to pay for music, we should go to the local pub or find indie music instead.
I have a lot of problems with the music industry from their legal tactics to their pricing (Seriously, it's 10-20 songs, for $20.00, that's nuts.) but they're still following the basic principle that we're not allowed to steal.
I would seriously hate to have an upgrade.
Especially like the current Mac path where after a few iterations it no longer supports your hardware and you need an operation.
"You have a G3 brain implant? Too bad, you'll need brain surgery before you can upgrade the OS.
They put down open source when releasing their Office suite but include Ogg Vorbis in Halo: Combat Evolved their flagship X-Box now PC game.
It seems that the sales and marketing people find it inferior but the developers don't.
Re:Especially in the fog of marketese that is .NET
on
Advanced .NET Remoting
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The point that was missed was that the problem defines the solution. Argue all you want that Remoting should be used and I can give you an example when it shouldn't or can't. That's why there are so many distributed programming methods.
Re:Especially in the fog of marketese that is .NET
on
Advanced .NET Remoting
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I agree with your RMI analogy to Remoting, that's pretty much what it is.
But as I disagree with the author that Remoting is usually best, I disagree that Web Services are much better way to go.
No offense, it's just that each part of the MS distributed programming elements of.NET are each good for different reasons.
Remoting: state and stateless, local and remote object calls for security
Web Services: stateless, designed for heterogeneous environment
COM+: pooling, jit activation
MSMQ: not a runtime but a message service built into.NET, queuing designed for asynchronous calls
ADO.NET: data access driven, built in SQL support, can be modified for other purposes.
These are just a few things to show the differences. These differences tend to define what problem they are best suited to solve.
Seriously, what OS isn't known to hackers/crackers? Fact is, the more obscure the OS the more interesting it becomes to crack.
The old question/answer "Why did you do it? Because it was there." tells the story of what will happen regardless of the OS chosen.
I'll admit that the script kidz may be able to hack-the-vote with a MS SQL server backend but I would hope that the network used (or whatever format of data transfer) would be a little more robust that a windows box in a DMZ.
But I'm sure that with a few days of coding it could be released from the bonds of M$... it is just SQL, right?
I checked out the Nature Materials website and found this abstract that has the same info as the article. Apparently the author was as cheap as I am and didn't fork over the $30 US to see the full text.
but I the first time I tried to do a little offline, off computer reading I realized that there was no print function. I didn't want to copy the whole thing or print it out for distribution. All I wanted to do is print off a chapter so I could hop in the car and read a little during my 5 hour drive during a weekend visit.
The people making anti piracy software have to realize that you just can't force people to act in a simple fashion so that it's easier for them. They have to realize that they have to find real and intelligent solutions that work and still allow Joe Legal user fair and useful access to the content that's being provided.
After doing a small search for a conversion program (this was a while back now) and not finding one, I just ditched it and went another route.
Clearly Microsoft has no motivation to continue upgrading their browser, as stated already, since they have no sizeable competition.
This is one of the reasons why they've had so much legal troubles. Giving away IE in hopes of quashing Netscape worked well even if it is anti-competitive.
More importantly is MS's general failure with a security model (or lack of one). The operating system has a poorly and retrofitted set of security features. Add on top of that "features" that all but wipe out security like:
active content executed from the browser without some type of sandbox
e-mail clients that do the same
the complete misunderstanding of administrator vs. user
an open-by-default mentality to installations
Add on top the total lack of revenue that directly comes from IE and this is what comes of it.
The sad thing is that if they had only spent more "quality time" on design and implementation, like any software development project, they would be spending less and making more now. What makes them different than most software makers is that they can buy and sell most other companies a few times over and still have this problem.
Check out this site for complete details but to lift a few important parts:
a person is not entitled to a patent if the invention was "known or used by others in this country, or was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country" before the date of invention by the applicant for the patent
But later there is a brief comment:
Naturally, if an inventor abandons the invention, he or she cannot obtain a patent.
And finally in support of M$'s patent, and likely the way they got it:
In a fast-changing world, finding a single piece of prior art which discloses the same invention as that claimed in a patent is not the most likely scenario. What is far more likely to occur is that the prior art will be something similar but not identical to the patented invention. The patent statutes also provide for this situation--in a negative manner. Specifically, section 103 of the code provides that a patent may not be obtained "though the invention is not identically disclosed or described [in the prior art] if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art." The test which is posed by this section is whether a worker of ordinary skill, knowing the prior art, would have found the patented invention obvious.
I'm not trying to fuel any fire but I tend to agree with the principle of the original poster. Not that this release isn't worth paying for, just that if it is, why make it a point release?
From a marketing perspective it's much easier to sell something that not only is different but also looks different (i.e. the major version number)
I guess by looking at old Windows, 3.1 and 3.11 were different versions that were not just free upgrades AFAIK, but I never liked that naming scheme either. lol.
The author states The Open Office Team and the Sun Microsystems developers must be working in Tandem to make their suites more accessible to the public. but from the Open Office website:
StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation.
This is a great interview with comments like How about we start with disciplining our kids, yeah I mean hitting them, and as for criminals fuck rehabbing rapist, I wouldn't even waste time with castration, just get the power generator going and hook it up to a big ass sofa and start the bbq. And we should start with criminal politicians that would help clean up that pimp house known as Congress. Vince Desi definitely has a strong opinion that games don't affect/influence mental health as long as they're not used in excess. I'm curious as to why he differentiates using kids as a content element from the rest of the burning, chopping, and general maiming. I'd also like to know if he separates physical violence in the extreme as okay as long as it's simulated compared to sexual violence. I am guessing he definitely does, but would like to hear/read it straight from him.
After reading the disclaimer "I should point out that I get a couple of small mentions in this book (the authors quote an email from me), and I also happen to agree with a lot of what the authors say. But I'll try to be as impartial as I can with this review." I was a little skeptical. It's pretty easy to enjoy a book that uses your ideas for content. I know it's not an entire book written around one e-mail but it's always a nice stroke to the ego to be found printable. That aside I think that although he did point out that the the writer is fair in his addressing the good and bad of XP and that the review is likely close to the truth, I feel as though the reviewer has taken more than great lengths to defend the book against the nay-sayers and "zealots". I'd like another review before running out to pick it up.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, once again I don't disagree with how well paper trail works. I'm saying that there are other ways to ensure database tampering doesn't happen, as was in your original post.
As for recording wrong votes, you're making some assumptions that the created paper would be error free.
For instance, lets say you are voting for the new president and choose Bob. The computer records this to the db and prints out a record. The db says Bob, the paper, in English says Bob but the computer readable code on the paper says Joe.
As an aside, consider that I can print out several Joe votes and stuff them into a container and complain that the system has been hacked. If the system were open source, this would be easier to do wouldn't it?
Regardless, it is inevitable that the paper trail will no longer be a useful method for auditing. It barely works now as a main method given the vast number of votes to count. And it's also not the favored method of voting by trees.
I think that there are other auditing methods that people often forget. Electronic auditing has the benefit of using encryption and redundant remote storage locations.
For example:
Take a series of 1000 votes and run MD5 against them to get a unique id. I send that id to 3 remote servers over encrypted channels where they are then written, encrypted, to the filesystem.
Repeat this for all votes.
Now when counting or recounting is done the votes are checked against the remote MD5 values to ensure that no changes have occured.
You can be as vigilant as you want adding more remote servers and increasing encryption as long as the hardware supports it.
I agree that a paper trail is a fine method of auditing but with some thought there are other ways to ensure every vote gets counted.
Well let me help ease your mind. Canadians, overall, and with exceptionally few exceptions, do not like or personally promote prison rape. And, although this is only personal opinion, I would not like it if anyone, personally or through some agency, did. Those who I've asked recently appear to agree with me. So rest assured that a pro prison-rape attitude is not a commonly shared opinion amongst Canadians. Whomever made that commercial should be deported, but once again, that's just my opinion. To sum it up, prison rape is very bad.
Also, I think you will be glad to know, that there are many Canadians who believe in ideas such as privatizing healthcare, changing the way that employment insurance and welfare work, and many other facets of how our government runs. I'm sure I could introduce you to a large group of social safety net hating Canadians as well. All opinions welcome, that's what makes democracy work. Vive le difference!
I can also introduce you to people born in many other countries who are new Canadians who have a whole slew of differing and opposing ideas. I've even managed to find people born in Canada with all sorts of strange variations on life. I'm sure I could find some people who live in Canada you would find less despicable than you may think. I am surprised daily how many people fall under the not-as-despicable-as-I-would-guess-they-would-be category.
But maybe I'm wasting my time. You've surely already made up your mind. Well informed with no need to reinvestigate your generalization.
I see that no other poster has seen these commercials so I have to question the validity of your statements.
I also see that you have an especially skewed opinion of the country you live in. I've got to warn you that no matter what country you live in, there is no perfect world. In time you may realize this. The U.S. is a fine country but has many of the ills of the country you love to bash. Country borders are blind to crime and violence. Your disdain for Canada may be displaced disdain for human imperfection.
Back to this post, I have no idea where your ads on American example came from but it's in very bad taste, even if you are just trying to make a point.
You point out that racial discrimination is bad, work-pay discrimination is bad, then you post in another reply:
Canadians are, on the whole, the vilest people I have encountered -- the exceptions are rare indeed.
Check out an online dictionary for a definition of discrimination...
Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit; partiality or prejudice: racial discrimination; discrimination against foreigners.
While you're there look up hypocrisy.
As insightful as your post may seem, it's also wrong. The same law exists under the Canadian Bill of Rights.
In addition I've never seen those commercials but assuming they exist, the people who make anti-drunk driving ads are not the same who control the penal system.
Finally, you may boast of being more civilized but most Canadians don't. Most Canadians as I would guess most Americans don't walk around with a moral scorecard. We've got better things to do.
Ok viruses. You took all that time to write that. Anonymously of course. Glad you got the point of the message.
what are the realistic chances of a payout?
:)
That depends on whether the virus writer has friends who could use $250k.
Actually wont' all this do is that, in the future, the virus writing will be done by the "professional" types
You're assuming that by eliminating the newbies that the professionals will be created. There's no supply/demand influence in this case. The fact is at this very moment both types are creating virii. The newbs will be easier to catch for sure, but there always a chance that a more professional and more detrimental writer will get caught too.
A patent is easy to get considering that the burden of proof depends partly on the party filing. Along with the research done by the patent office, which takes a long time, the patent filer is supposed to, for their own sake, research for prior art, etc. I've been schooled on this by another slashdot user on the topic of how many ways there are to bust a patent.
What if there was a Software Development Artists Association that ran rampant throughout the US finding people who shared the applications and sued them? Would /. be as quick to scorn that action? Would we say "Heck with SDAA, we shouldn't pay for software from large companies." Wouldn't that affect a significant percentage of the people using this site?
I know I don't like the idea of the code I write for the company that pays me being used without compensation. If you don't want to pay, there are Open Source alternatives. We should consider that if we don't want to pay for music, we should go to the local pub or find indie music instead.
I have a lot of problems with the music industry from their legal tactics to their pricing (Seriously, it's 10-20 songs, for $20.00, that's nuts.) but they're still following the basic principle that we're not allowed to steal.
I would seriously hate to have an upgrade.
Especially like the current Mac path where after a few iterations it no longer supports your hardware and you need an operation.
"You have a G3 brain implant? Too bad, you'll need brain surgery before you can upgrade the OS.
They put down open source when releasing their Office suite but include Ogg Vorbis in Halo: Combat Evolved their flagship X-Box now PC game.
It seems that the sales and marketing people find it inferior but the developers don't.
The point that was missed was that the problem defines the solution. Argue all you want that Remoting should be used and I can give you an example when it shouldn't or can't. That's why there are so many distributed programming methods.
I agree with your RMI analogy to Remoting, that's pretty much what it is. .NET are each good for different reasons.
.NET, queuing designed for asynchronous calls
But as I disagree with the author that Remoting is usually best, I disagree that Web Services are much better way to go.
No offense, it's just that each part of the MS distributed programming elements of
Remoting: state and stateless, local and remote object calls for security
Web Services: stateless, designed for heterogeneous environment
COM+: pooling, jit activation
MSMQ: not a runtime but a message service built into
ADO.NET: data access driven, built in SQL support, can be modified for other purposes.
These are just a few things to show the differences. These differences tend to define what problem they are best suited to solve.
Seriously, what OS isn't known to hackers/crackers? Fact is, the more obscure the OS the more interesting it becomes to crack.
The old question/answer "Why did you do it? Because it was there." tells the story of what will happen regardless of the OS chosen.
I'll admit that the script kidz may be able to hack-the-vote with a MS SQL server backend but I would hope that the network used (or whatever format of data transfer) would be a little more robust that a windows box in a DMZ.
But I'm sure that with a few days of coding it could be released from the bonds of M$... it is just SQL, right?
I checked out the Nature Materials website and found this abstract that has the same info as the article. Apparently the author was as cheap as I am and didn't fork over the $30 US to see the full text.
but I the first time I tried to do a little offline, off computer reading I realized that there was no print function. I didn't want to copy the whole thing or print it out for distribution. All I wanted to do is print off a chapter so I could hop in the car and read a little during my 5 hour drive during a weekend visit.
The people making anti piracy software have to realize that you just can't force people to act in a simple fashion so that it's easier for them. They have to realize that they have to find real and intelligent solutions that work and still allow Joe Legal user fair and useful access to the content that's being provided.
After doing a small search for a conversion program (this was a while back now) and not finding one, I just ditched it and went another route.
This is one of the reasons why they've had so much legal troubles. Giving away IE in hopes of quashing Netscape worked well even if it is anti-competitive.
More importantly is MS's general failure with a security model (or lack of one). The operating system has a poorly and retrofitted set of security features. Add on top of that "features" that all but wipe out security like:
active content executed from the browser without some type of sandbox
e-mail clients that do the same
the complete misunderstanding of administrator vs. user
an open-by-default mentality to installations
Add on top the total lack of revenue that directly comes from IE and this is what comes of it.
The sad thing is that if they had only spent more "quality time" on design and implementation, like any software development project, they would be spending less and making more now. What makes them different than most software makers is that they can buy and sell most other companies a few times over and still have this problem.
The 3rd reason is actually AGAINST M$ getting the patent, oppsie.
Check out this site for complete details but to lift a few important parts:
a person is not entitled to a patent if the invention was "known or used by others in this country, or was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country" before the date of invention by the applicant for the patent
But later there is a brief comment:
Naturally, if an inventor abandons the invention, he or she cannot obtain a patent.
And finally in support of M$'s patent, and likely the way they got it:
In a fast-changing world, finding a single piece of prior art which discloses the same invention as that claimed in a patent is not the most likely scenario. What is far more likely to occur is that the prior art will be something similar but not identical to the patented invention. The patent statutes also provide for this situation--in a negative manner. Specifically, section 103 of the code provides that a patent may not be obtained "though the invention is not identically disclosed or described [in the prior art] if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art." The test which is posed by this section is whether a worker of ordinary skill, knowing the prior art, would have found the patented invention obvious.
I'm not trying to fuel any fire but I tend to agree with the principle of the original poster. Not that this release isn't worth paying for, just that if it is, why make it a point release?
From a marketing perspective it's much easier to sell something that not only is different but also looks different (i.e. the major version number)
I guess by looking at old Windows, 3.1 and 3.11 were different versions that were not just free upgrades AFAIK, but I never liked that naming scheme either. lol.
Ya got me there, it's Firebird not Thunderbird but I'd still call it a lite version of Mozilla being that it is based on the Mozilla codebase :)
Actually that is a lite version of Mozilla.
The author states The Open Office Team and the Sun Microsystems developers must be working in Tandem to make their suites more accessible to the public. but from the Open Office website:
StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation.
This is a great interview with comments like How about we start with disciplining our kids, yeah I mean hitting them, and as for criminals fuck rehabbing rapist, I wouldn't even waste time with castration, just get the power generator going and hook it up to a big ass sofa and start the bbq. And we should start with criminal politicians that would help clean up that pimp house known as Congress. Vince Desi definitely has a strong opinion that games don't affect/influence mental health as long as they're not used in excess. I'm curious as to why he differentiates using kids as a content element from the rest of the burning, chopping, and general maiming. I'd also like to know if he separates physical violence in the extreme as okay as long as it's simulated compared to sexual violence. I am guessing he definitely does, but would like to hear/read it straight from him.
After reading the disclaimer "I should point out that I get a couple of small mentions in this book (the authors quote an email from me), and I also happen to agree with a lot of what the authors say. But I'll try to be as impartial as I can with this review." I was a little skeptical. It's pretty easy to enjoy a book that uses your ideas for content. I know it's not an entire book written around one e-mail but it's always a nice stroke to the ego to be found printable. That aside I think that although he did point out that the the writer is fair in his addressing the good and bad of XP and that the review is likely close to the truth, I feel as though the reviewer has taken more than great lengths to defend the book against the nay-sayers and "zealots". I'd like another review before running out to pick it up.