Um, RSA SecureID or other multi-factor authentication does not solve the private key distribution problem nor does it try to. It still requires PKC to obtain a private session key, unless you have already exchanged keys off-line.
It is true that it's more about trusting the infrastructure, but there'd be no infrastructure to trust without a way to solve the key distribution problem. PKC is the only method today to do it on the same untrusted network that you will be communicating over.
No, mass and energy are equivalent. You don't "convert" mass into energy, mass is energy, and the amount of energy the mass represents is m*c^2. And the amount of mass some energy represents is E/C^2. This equation always applies. Not just when converting mass to some other form of energy, but always. If you were to use a unit system where c = 1, then the equation would literally be E = m.
For example -- 2 H20 molecules have less mass than 4 H2 + 2 O2 because H20 is a lower energy state. When the hydrogen and oxygen bind, it releases energy and therefore mass, and the resulting molecule weights less than its components separately. The same is true for molecules which are a higher energy state -- they weigh more than their components, because they have more energy and therefore mass.
Neuromancer's prediction was similar to that in Snowcrash.
Yeah, in the same sense that Lord of the Rings depicted a fantasy world that was similar to those in the Dragonlance novels.
All props to Stephenson for that book, but he was hardly making a daring prediction. He was taking the cyber-world already established in the genre by Neuromancer and adding some tweaks to it.
But if you're sending unmanned probes and rovers, it leads me to ask why do we even do that? We can probably get a lot more bang for buck focussing on science on the planet.
"Science" is not a fungible entity, where you can just try to optimize the units of science you produce for a given cost and use those science-units to get the next tech upgrade.
There are things about the universe, and even our own planet, that we cannot learn without studying other bodies in space. And our view from earth -- even in earth orbit -- is limited. We need to send probes to study them more closely, and rovers to the surface to conduct experiments.
But if you stop counting Pluto as a planet, and then you discover another Kuiper Belt object that's not only bigger than Eris but as big or bigger than Mercury, do you make it a planet, or do you take Mercury off the list?
Mercury would remain in hydrostatic equilibrium, and thus would continue to satisfy the only size-based criterion for planethood.
This hypothetical KBO would have to be very large in order to out-mass the rest of the objects in its orbit enough to qualify for the "clearing the neighborhood" criterion. But if it was large enough, a planet it would be.
Interestingly, both Ceres and Eris have done a better job of clearing their orbit than Pluto. Which is to say a terrible job that's still 5 orders of magnitudes below the least of the planets.:)
(How do you determine what 'clears an orbit' in a young solar system where there's still lots of small stuff everywhere?)
That's a good question. You could resolve it by either saying you can only categorize objects in older, stable systems. Or that everything in such a young system is at best a proto-planet that may or may not become a planet depending on how things shake out.
Extrasolar planets are where we're most likely to find ambiguous cases, and where we will eventually have to throw up our hands about drawing infinitely precise lines between categories.
Thankfully, our own solar system does not require drawing a precise line since there's such a huge gap between things that have cleared their orbit and things that haven't. I would suspect that this is not an accident, and rather a consequence of planetary formation where either an object accumulates enough mass and is in the right orbit and so either absorbs or tosses everything else out, or it isn't and so a bunch of smaller fragments all remain.
But with the study of extrasolar systems just beginning, I don't want to extrapolate too much from the data point of 1 system.:)
There's still a fair chance we will find something else in our own system that the definition either calls a planet or some sort of ambiguous case (If the albedo is average for an icy rock, then it's not a planet but if there's something darker on the surface, maybe it is...).
That actually seems pretty unlikely... Like I mentioned before, for there to be a planet lurking in the Kuiper Belt it'd have to be pretty dang big, like Jupiter. But if there was a Jupiter-sized object in the KB, then it would have had a noticeable gravitational effect on the belt (not to mention Neptune) and it would look very different.
Why does it seem odd that changes in status would result in changes in categorization?
If Saturn was sucked into another dimension without disturbing any of its satellites, then the 6th planet of the solar system might end up being Titan.
No. Pluto's planetary discriminant -- essentially the ratio of its mass to the mass of the other objects in it's orbit, not counting direct satellites, is 0.077. Eris is 0.1 and Ceres is 0.33.
Neptune's is 2.4x10^4, and it has the lowest discriminant of any of the IAU-defined planets. Earth is actually on top at 1.7 Ã-- 10^6!
That's a 5 order of magnitude difference.
I mean, "clearing the orbit" is the part of the IAU definition of "planet" that causes Pluto to be excluded, so it's a little weird that you'd nerd out on planet definitions but not know that.:)
Aluminum does form a thin layer of oxide on the surface almost instantly, which prevents further oxidation. It's why aluminum sign posts or corrugated roofing lasts so long, and why in applications where oxidation of aluminum is desired (like in some fuel cells) they have to combine the aluminum with something else so that the oxidation doesn't stop as soon as it starts.
That isn't much of an electrical insulator though.
This is a fairly typical fear reaction. Politicians and government bodies feel that they need to be seen to be acting in order to avoid a future event, resulting in questions about their inaction. It's not some kind of conspiracy. It's the same kind of fear response that results in laws that say that if you've been arrested for having sex in public, you have to register yourself as a threat to your neighbors' children.
Right. It's like a conversation I had with some friends about TSA, and my opinion was that the vast majority (but not all, please keep metal detectors and luggage scanners) of what they do is just Security Theater, with an infinitesimal chance of actually preventing an attack since anyone with the drive to penetrate Security Regime X would have the drive to penetrate X * 1.001. If someone really wants to blow up a plane, they're going to cram some C4 up their ass and pull it out in the lavatory on the plane and there's no way people are going to put up with the procedures designed to thwart the Butthole Bomber. So having expensive machines that stop at the Underpants Bomber are basically futile.
But I had to concede that if it were I who was in charge of deciding whether or not to actually implement the Anti-Underpants-Bomber scanners, and it was my ass on the line if I said "no" and we were Underpants-Bombed again, I would probably end up saying "yes".
But Lucas had obviously planned for the AT-ATs already in 1977, just like he always planned on making the prequels so they could be viewed in episodic order in such a way that this would ruin every surprise in the 'later' 3 movies.
Huh. And I thought the reason was that the bat's echolocation would give them a perfect image of the fighter, and they'd be thinking "Huh? They expect that thing to fly?!" and forget to change course.
Right, they typically acknowledge that there's a Free Speech issue, but argue that the speech in question should not be protected as a way of resolving that issue.
ArcherB is arguing that there is no Free Speech issue to begin with, that the video games being made should in fact be protected, but restricting the sale of works of art does not have free speech implications for said works.
So, falling below the standards of the usual Censorship Brigade.
14th Amendment says that distinction is no longer important when it comes to the rights of citizens.
MAKING the video game, however, absolutely is an expression of free speech. But that's not what was on trial here. What was on trial is "does the state have the limit the purchasing power of minors". I think it does.
"You're allowed to make this work of artistic expression, but you're not allowed to distribute it to a class of people" is without a doubt a Free Speech issue. Trying to separate the making from the selling is a clever dodge around Free Speech but not one SCOTUS is going to fall for.
You can disagree with how the decision was made -- after all, Free Speech is not without any restrictions at all so just because it is involved doesn't mean the decision must go a certain way -- but it is certainly a Free Speech issue.
Are you suggesting the child should be in control? As a parent IT'S MY JOB TO BE IN CONTROL!
No, he's suggesting that the parents of children who aren't yours should be in control. However you are advocating having the government be in control, instead, completely undermining your capitalized declaration.
You don't realize this (or realize that this was the point the GP was making) because the law is trying to control other parents' children in the same way you would choose to control yours. And so by advocating that the government enforce your parenting decisions on others, you are trying to exercise the control you in the next post say should be held by the parents.
Now imagine the shoe were on the other foot, and that the law under consideration was based on how some other parent thought children should be raised that was different than yours. Now they're taking away your control, but not in a way you agree with. Still okay?
So why should intel have to write optimizations into their compiler for a competitor?
They don't. The issue isn't "optimizations" as one usually thinks of it, tweaking a piece of code with compiler tricks to make it run faster.
The issue is using entirely different code paths that use x86 extensions like the SSE family of instructions. These instructions, in addition to being SIMD for when the same operation is being performed on multiple pieces of data, are essentially a replacement for the old x87 floating point co-processor instructions. x87, which is old and stupid, and a right bitch for both programmers and hardware designers.
There is no processor which supports SSE where that codepath would not be faster than x87. Intel doesn't have to optimize the SSE code for AMD, and nobody is asking them to -- AMD optimizes their implementation to be fast with the code Intel (and other compilers) produce.
The problem comes when the code Intel produces specifically ignores their own spec on how to detect if these instructions are supported, and instead checks for a "GenuineIntel" vendor string, and resorts to the x87 codepath for anything else. Even though AMD chips support both the SSE instruction set and the specification for detecting it.
So that's the problem. Intel is deliberately de-optimizing competitor's parts.
Can the feature be overridden? Yeah. If you know about it, you can hack the binary to remove the check, or you could use a microcode patch to make an AMD chip return an Intel vendor string. The former is illegal if you are an end-user of a non-Free program, and the latter is illegal if you're AMD.
Is it overblown? Maybe. It's a direct and flagrant instance of Intel taking action not to boost themselves, but to harm a competitor. It costs AMD quite a bit of performance in a variety of common and popular programs, as would be expected, and which can be shown by disabling the "feature".
Personally I think that when the solution is so simple and logical -- Intel honors their own damn spec and the CPUID bits for SSE and other instruction sets -- not doing it represents just maliciousness on Intel's part, and so the level of reaction is warranted.
Good points all around, but what is the point of machine voting then?
Accessibility. It's easier to make a handicap-accessible machine than figuring out a way to make filling in little bubbles with a pencil possible for arthritic people, or other handicaps.
Accuracy. The computer can easily enforce rules like "no multi-votes". No more hanging chads, partially filled bubbles, etc. Granted a scan-tron system can just reject a ballot for the voter to fix, but this makes the editing and error feedback all easier.
There's other minor benefits, like you could randomize candidate order for fairness, or include extra information like a description of what each proposition on the ballot is.
That's about it. Is it worth it? Eh, I'm not sure, but people in this country seem to have such a hard-on for them and for instant counting, that I consider it inevitable. So I just want it to be the case that our electronic voting systems preserve fundamental aspects of the vote.
Right now, you have exit polls seconds after the election closes, and they tend to be quite accurate (well, in Germany anyway, which is where I'm from).
They're accurate in the U.S. also, to the point where it fueled a bunch of conspiracy theories when polls for an important precinct were not.
I said nothing about security, I was solely talking about making sure the ballot accurately records the voter's intent. And yes, only paper ballots can ensure that.
Physical security of the ballots once cast is still required, as well as an open counting process, whether you're using electronic voting machines or not, and so is orthogonal to the problem being discussed.
I figured this would be obvious to anyone who thought about it for two seconds. I guess it only takes one second of thought to make a foolish snark. Which amuses me.
A voter casts an encrypted ballot in which the key they possess is useless to anyone wishing to find out what the vote was, but where there is one and only one key that can decrypt that ballot and produce a valid record. This requires that you have two machines - the one generating the key pair and the one doing the decryption, where both are tamper-proof, the link is unidirectional and the link is also tamper-proof.
Oh wow, when you said there were other methods to solve the veracity problem, this is not what I thought you meant. I'm sorry, but this is a hard fail.
If we had voting machines which were tamper-proof, and which could be trusted to record the voter's vote reliably, and rigorously obeyed all requirements like "destroy the encryption keys" or "don't change the voter's vote before encrypting it" then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Your whole system falls apart because there is no way for the voter to be sure that the machine that encrypts their vote has encrypted the vote which they desired instead of altering it first. Or recording the encryption key for future recovery or editing. Etc.
All you've done is ensure that the link between the voting machine and the central database isn't vulnerable to modification en-route. Which is not the biggest problem with voting machines by far. The use of quantum encryption to solve this tiny portion of the problem is complete overkill while still not fixing the fundamental issue, for example.
Only paper ballots ensure that the will of the voter is properly recorded in said ballot.
(Post mode was "plain old text" before you ask.:P)
Which, intuitively, means "Use html, but interpret blank lines as paragraph indicators for <p> tags." Which is what "html formatted" means, as far as I can tell. It's been that way for so long, I've kinda stopped thinking about. Used to be you had to select a middle option between html and plain-text to get the "html but with automatic paragraphs" functionality.
Now, let me see... Okay, "extrans (html tags to text)" seems to be just what you'd think "plain old text" would be. And "code", which I would have thought would mean pure html, actually is the same as extrans only with <tt> tags around it.
I prefer the type where you enter your vote on a touchscreen and get a printout that is duplicated and dropped in a lockbox by the machine itself.
Change it to where the voter drops the one-and-only printout into the lockbox themselves, after verifying that it is correct. Then we're in agreement.
First, because otherwise how does the voter know the printout put in the box is the same as the one they're holding? If we trusted the machine to do that correctly, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Second, because any idea which sacrifices the secret ballot is a horrible idea.
Open source is really irrelevant. You can never prove that the voting machine is running an un-altered binary produced from that code on unaltered hardware and with unalterable memory. It's not bad, but it doesn't guarantee anything, so if that's what you think is keeping voting from being equal to a magician counting the votes, then that's a false sense of security you're feeling.
The way you make voting secure is to take the part where you have to trust the machine's memory, with no way for the voter to confirm that its contents are correct -- the magician, essentially -- out of the picture.
Instead, the machine should simply be an enabler for printing a correct ballot. That paper ballot must be the only ballot that matters. That ballot can be machine readable, but it must also be human readable, and it must be the same markings that both human and machines read to determine who the ballot is for.
In this regime, it doesn't matter if the source is open or closed. It doesn't matter if the voting machine is compromised. Because now the "magic" is out in the open, so if the machine tries to pull any tricks, the voter has the ability to actually see that their vote was recorded incorrectly, and not put that ballot in the ballot box.
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Um, RSA SecureID or other multi-factor authentication does not solve the private key distribution problem nor does it try to. It still requires PKC to obtain a private session key, unless you have already exchanged keys off-line.
It is true that it's more about trusting the infrastructure, but there'd be no infrastructure to trust without a way to solve the key distribution problem. PKC is the only method today to do it on the same untrusted network that you will be communicating over.
No, mass and energy are equivalent. You don't "convert" mass into energy, mass is energy, and the amount of energy the mass represents is m*c^2. And the amount of mass some energy represents is E/C^2. This equation always applies. Not just when converting mass to some other form of energy, but always. If you were to use a unit system where c = 1, then the equation would literally be E = m.
For example -- 2 H20 molecules have less mass than 4 H2 + 2 O2 because H20 is a lower energy state. When the hydrogen and oxygen bind, it releases energy and therefore mass, and the resulting molecule weights less than its components separately. The same is true for molecules which are a higher energy state -- they weigh more than their components, because they have more energy and therefore mass.
Look up "mass energy equivalence" for more info.
Neuromancer's prediction was similar to that in Snowcrash.
Yeah, in the same sense that Lord of the Rings depicted a fantasy world that was similar to those in the Dragonlance novels.
All props to Stephenson for that book, but he was hardly making a daring prediction. He was taking the cyber-world already established in the genre by Neuromancer and adding some tweaks to it.
But if you're sending unmanned probes and rovers, it leads me to ask why do we even do that? We can probably get a lot more bang for buck focussing on science on the planet.
"Science" is not a fungible entity, where you can just try to optimize the units of science you produce for a given cost and use those science-units to get the next tech upgrade.
There are things about the universe, and even our own planet, that we cannot learn without studying other bodies in space. And our view from earth -- even in earth orbit -- is limited. We need to send probes to study them more closely, and rovers to the surface to conduct experiments.
Even longer than that. The Greeks invented a steam engine in the 1st century, but couldn't think of any uses for it and so it remained a curiosity.
One comment in, and already the comment section for this article is too pedantic to read. Good job /.
Sorry for being pedantic, but I think you meant too stupid.
But if you stop counting Pluto as a planet, and then you discover another Kuiper Belt object that's not only bigger than Eris but as big or bigger than Mercury, do you make it a planet, or do you take Mercury off the list?
Mercury would remain in hydrostatic equilibrium, and thus would continue to satisfy the only size-based criterion for planethood.
This hypothetical KBO would have to be very large in order to out-mass the rest of the objects in its orbit enough to qualify for the "clearing the neighborhood" criterion. But if it was large enough, a planet it would be.
Interestingly, both Ceres and Eris have done a better job of clearing their orbit than Pluto. Which is to say a terrible job that's still 5 orders of magnitudes below the least of the planets. :)
(How do you determine what 'clears an orbit' in a young solar system where there's still lots of small stuff everywhere?)
That's a good question. You could resolve it by either saying you can only categorize objects in older, stable systems. Or that everything in such a young system is at best a proto-planet that may or may not become a planet depending on how things shake out.
Extrasolar planets are where we're most likely to find ambiguous cases, and where we will eventually have to throw up our hands about drawing infinitely precise lines between categories.
Thankfully, our own solar system does not require drawing a precise line since there's such a huge gap between things that have cleared their orbit and things that haven't. I would suspect that this is not an accident, and rather a consequence of planetary formation where either an object accumulates enough mass and is in the right orbit and so either absorbs or tosses everything else out, or it isn't and so a bunch of smaller fragments all remain.
But with the study of extrasolar systems just beginning, I don't want to extrapolate too much from the data point of 1 system. :)
There's still a fair chance we will find something else in our own system that the definition either calls a planet or some sort of ambiguous case (If the albedo is average for an icy rock, then it's not a planet but if there's something darker on the surface, maybe it is...).
That actually seems pretty unlikely... Like I mentioned before, for there to be a planet lurking in the Kuiper Belt it'd have to be pretty dang big, like Jupiter. But if there was a Jupiter-sized object in the KB, then it would have had a noticeable gravitational effect on the belt (not to mention Neptune) and it would look very different.
Why does it seem odd that changes in status would result in changes in categorization?
If Saturn was sucked into another dimension without disturbing any of its satellites, then the 6th planet of the solar system might end up being Titan.
No. Pluto's planetary discriminant -- essentially the ratio of its mass to the mass of the other objects in it's orbit, not counting direct satellites, is 0.077. Eris is 0.1 and Ceres is 0.33.
Neptune's is 2.4x10^4, and it has the lowest discriminant of any of the IAU-defined planets. Earth is actually on top at 1.7 Ã-- 10^6!
That's a 5 order of magnitude difference.
I mean, "clearing the orbit" is the part of the IAU definition of "planet" that causes Pluto to be excluded, so it's a little weird that you'd nerd out on planet definitions but not know that. :)
Aluminum does form a thin layer of oxide on the surface almost instantly, which prevents further oxidation. It's why aluminum sign posts or corrugated roofing lasts so long, and why in applications where oxidation of aluminum is desired (like in some fuel cells) they have to combine the aluminum with something else so that the oxidation doesn't stop as soon as it starts.
That isn't much of an electrical insulator though.
This is a fairly typical fear reaction. Politicians and government bodies feel that they need to be seen to be acting in order to avoid a future event, resulting in questions about their inaction. It's not some kind of conspiracy. It's the same kind of fear response that results in laws that say that if you've been arrested for having sex in public, you have to register yourself as a threat to your neighbors' children.
Right. It's like a conversation I had with some friends about TSA, and my opinion was that the vast majority (but not all, please keep metal detectors and luggage scanners) of what they do is just Security Theater, with an infinitesimal chance of actually preventing an attack since anyone with the drive to penetrate Security Regime X would have the drive to penetrate X * 1.001. If someone really wants to blow up a plane, they're going to cram some C4 up their ass and pull it out in the lavatory on the plane and there's no way people are going to put up with the procedures designed to thwart the Butthole Bomber. So having expensive machines that stop at the Underpants Bomber are basically futile.
But I had to concede that if it were I who was in charge of deciding whether or not to actually implement the Anti-Underpants-Bomber scanners, and it was my ass on the line if I said "no" and we were Underpants-Bombed again, I would probably end up saying "yes".
But Lucas had obviously planned for the AT-ATs already in 1977, just like he always planned on making the prequels so they could be viewed in episodic order in such a way that this would ruin every surprise in the 'later' 3 movies.
Huh. And I thought the reason was that the bat's echolocation would give them a perfect image of the fighter, and they'd be thinking "Huh? They expect that thing to fly?!" and forget to change course.
Why, is 2012 the year you accept that you'll die a virgin and your collection of Babylon 5 fan fiction is worthless?
Right, they typically acknowledge that there's a Free Speech issue, but argue that the speech in question should not be protected as a way of resolving that issue.
ArcherB is arguing that there is no Free Speech issue to begin with, that the video games being made should in fact be protected, but restricting the sale of works of art does not have free speech implications for said works.
So, falling below the standards of the usual Censorship Brigade.
STATE governments. Not the FEDERAL government.
14th Amendment says that distinction is no longer important when it comes to the rights of citizens.
MAKING the video game, however, absolutely is an expression of free speech. But that's not what was on trial here. What was on trial is "does the state have the limit the purchasing power of minors". I think it does.
"You're allowed to make this work of artistic expression, but you're not allowed to distribute it to a class of people" is without a doubt a Free Speech issue. Trying to separate the making from the selling is a clever dodge around Free Speech but not one SCOTUS is going to fall for.
You can disagree with how the decision was made -- after all, Free Speech is not without any restrictions at all so just because it is involved doesn't mean the decision must go a certain way -- but it is certainly a Free Speech issue.
Are you suggesting the child should be in control? As a parent IT'S MY JOB TO BE IN CONTROL!
No, he's suggesting that the parents of children who aren't yours should be in control. However you are advocating having the government be in control, instead, completely undermining your capitalized declaration.
You don't realize this (or realize that this was the point the GP was making) because the law is trying to control other parents' children in the same way you would choose to control yours. And so by advocating that the government enforce your parenting decisions on others, you are trying to exercise the control you in the next post say should be held by the parents.
Now imagine the shoe were on the other foot, and that the law under consideration was based on how some other parent thought children should be raised that was different than yours. Now they're taking away your control, but not in a way you agree with. Still okay?
So why should intel have to write optimizations into their compiler for a competitor?
They don't. The issue isn't "optimizations" as one usually thinks of it, tweaking a piece of code with compiler tricks to make it run faster.
The issue is using entirely different code paths that use x86 extensions like the SSE family of instructions. These instructions, in addition to being SIMD for when the same operation is being performed on multiple pieces of data, are essentially a replacement for the old x87 floating point co-processor instructions. x87, which is old and stupid, and a right bitch for both programmers and hardware designers.
There is no processor which supports SSE where that codepath would not be faster than x87. Intel doesn't have to optimize the SSE code for AMD, and nobody is asking them to -- AMD optimizes their implementation to be fast with the code Intel (and other compilers) produce.
The problem comes when the code Intel produces specifically ignores their own spec on how to detect if these instructions are supported, and instead checks for a "GenuineIntel" vendor string, and resorts to the x87 codepath for anything else. Even though AMD chips support both the SSE instruction set and the specification for detecting it.
So that's the problem. Intel is deliberately de-optimizing competitor's parts.
Can the feature be overridden? Yeah. If you know about it, you can hack the binary to remove the check, or you could use a microcode patch to make an AMD chip return an Intel vendor string. The former is illegal if you are an end-user of a non-Free program, and the latter is illegal if you're AMD.
Is it overblown? Maybe. It's a direct and flagrant instance of Intel taking action not to boost themselves, but to harm a competitor. It costs AMD quite a bit of performance in a variety of common and popular programs, as would be expected, and which can be shown by disabling the "feature".
Personally I think that when the solution is so simple and logical -- Intel honors their own damn spec and the CPUID bits for SSE and other instruction sets -- not doing it represents just maliciousness on Intel's part, and so the level of reaction is warranted.
Good points all around, but what is the point of machine voting then?
Accessibility. It's easier to make a handicap-accessible machine than figuring out a way to make filling in little bubbles with a pencil possible for arthritic people, or other handicaps.
Accuracy. The computer can easily enforce rules like "no multi-votes". No more hanging chads, partially filled bubbles, etc. Granted a scan-tron system can just reject a ballot for the voter to fix, but this makes the editing and error feedback all easier.
There's other minor benefits, like you could randomize candidate order for fairness, or include extra information like a description of what each proposition on the ballot is.
That's about it. Is it worth it? Eh, I'm not sure, but people in this country seem to have such a hard-on for them and for instant counting, that I consider it inevitable. So I just want it to be the case that our electronic voting systems preserve fundamental aspects of the vote.
Right now, you have exit polls seconds after the election closes, and they tend to be quite accurate (well, in Germany anyway, which is where I'm from).
They're accurate in the U.S. also, to the point where it fueled a bunch of conspiracy theories when polls for an important precinct were not.
I said nothing about security, I was solely talking about making sure the ballot accurately records the voter's intent. And yes, only paper ballots can ensure that.
Physical security of the ballots once cast is still required, as well as an open counting process, whether you're using electronic voting machines or not, and so is orthogonal to the problem being discussed.
I figured this would be obvious to anyone who thought about it for two seconds. I guess it only takes one second of thought to make a foolish snark. Which amuses me.
A voter casts an encrypted ballot in which the key they possess is useless to anyone wishing to find out what the vote was, but where there is one and only one key that can decrypt that ballot and produce a valid record. This requires that you have two machines - the one generating the key pair and the one doing the decryption, where both are tamper-proof, the link is unidirectional and the link is also tamper-proof.
Oh wow, when you said there were other methods to solve the veracity problem, this is not what I thought you meant. I'm sorry, but this is a hard fail.
If we had voting machines which were tamper-proof, and which could be trusted to record the voter's vote reliably, and rigorously obeyed all requirements like "destroy the encryption keys" or "don't change the voter's vote before encrypting it" then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Your whole system falls apart because there is no way for the voter to be sure that the machine that encrypts their vote has encrypted the vote which they desired instead of altering it first. Or recording the encryption key for future recovery or editing. Etc.
All you've done is ensure that the link between the voting machine and the central database isn't vulnerable to modification en-route. Which is not the biggest problem with voting machines by far. The use of quantum encryption to solve this tiny portion of the problem is complete overkill while still not fixing the fundamental issue, for example.
Only paper ballots ensure that the will of the voter is properly recorded in said ballot.
(Post mode was "plain old text" before you ask. :P)
Which, intuitively, means "Use html, but interpret blank lines as paragraph indicators for <p> tags." Which is what "html formatted" means, as far as I can tell. It's been that way for so long, I've kinda stopped thinking about. Used to be you had to select a middle option between html and plain-text to get the "html but with automatic paragraphs" functionality.
Now, let me see... Okay, "extrans (html tags to text)" seems to be just what you'd think "plain old text" would be. And "code", which I would have thought would mean pure html, actually is the same as extrans only with <tt> tags around it.
Huh.
Anyway, quite an understandable mistake. :)
I prefer the type where you enter your vote on a touchscreen and get a printout that is duplicated and dropped in a lockbox by the machine itself.
Change it to where the voter drops the one-and-only printout into the lockbox themselves, after verifying that it is correct. Then we're in agreement.
First, because otherwise how does the voter know the printout put in the box is the same as the one they're holding? If we trusted the machine to do that correctly, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Second, because any idea which sacrifices the secret ballot is a horrible idea.
Open source is really irrelevant. You can never prove that the voting machine is running an un-altered binary produced from that code on unaltered hardware and with unalterable memory. It's not bad, but it doesn't guarantee anything, so if that's what you think is keeping voting from being equal to a magician counting the votes, then that's a false sense of security you're feeling.
The way you make voting secure is to take the part where you have to trust the machine's memory, with no way for the voter to confirm that its contents are correct -- the magician, essentially -- out of the picture.
Instead, the machine should simply be an enabler for printing a correct ballot. That paper ballot must be the only ballot that matters. That ballot can be machine readable, but it must also be human readable, and it must be the same markings that both human and machines read to determine who the ballot is for.
In this regime, it doesn't matter if the source is open or closed. It doesn't matter if the voting machine is compromised. Because now the "magic" is out in the open, so if the machine tries to pull any tricks, the voter has the ability to actually see that their vote was recorded incorrectly, and not put that ballot in the ballot box.
Sure, in the same way that underage drinking is federally legalized.
Or murder.
Explicitly deferring power to the state is not really the same as "legalizing" something.
Explicitly deferring power to the states, when previously it had been illegal at the federal level, is exactly the same as "legalizing federally".
"Legalizing federally" is not the same though as "legalizing nationally"; maybe that's where the confusion stemmed from.