Of course I've heard of stuffing the ballot box. That doesn't mean that such a thing is easier to achieve than, say, a biased company making closed source voting machines putting in a bit of code to ensure that their guy gets a better proportion of the vote than he would otherwise.
Stuffing the ballot box these days would require cross-party cooperation by observers and counters. Pretty unlikely, IMHO.
I'm going to need a citation on that. Cross party vote rigging in the UK or US is not something that's even been mooted as far as I'm aware.
Whilst the political classes do constantly fuck the people over, having two or more groups of power hungry asshats tends to keep them honest, or at least keeps them at each others' throats watching for the other(s) to screw up.
"Because it's so hard to simply rig the final result of counting"
Actually, yes, that is hard when you have observers and counters of all political colours involved. Compared to a hack or a fix in firmware of a whole set of machines that renders the fraud very hard to detect, yes, it's very hard to get the complicity of thousands of people from different parts of the political spectrum.
Yup, the government. You're forced to give them data and they keep losing it. Other than that I'd like to ask how it is that you can know in advance which company is going to lose your data?
It's only your responsibility to keep your details secure if you have prior knowledge of what's going to happen to them. This is one reason why there should be legal protections.
Another is that companies will often change their behaviour for the worse, especially in times of financial difficulty. There need to be legal provisions in place to stop them selling data on.
We spend a lot of time looking at efficiency and trying to do more with what we've got. This is because we're interested in selling software for everyone's hardware and not just our own. You can't get everyone to switch to exclusively our stuff, but we can still get into their operations by being the best.
OTOH, gay rights and not bringing back the death penalty, are two areas where the mob would probably be fiercely illiberal, but the political classes are not.
Again, I believe I have more in common with the educated and wealthy politicians than I do with the half of the population that have below average intelligence and believe what the tabloids tell them.
There's a lot wrong with politicians, and there's a lot wrong with my views (that effectively lead to a denial of self determination for the people), but I am better off without the morons being in charge.
"ou have an irrational belief that politician will somehow decide better in your interest than the majority of people (with which, by the way, you share more interests than with the politicians)."
Do I really?
As a well off, well educated, middle class professional, I have far more in common with the set of people in politics than I do with the slavering masses. Even when I disagree with them and think they're complete idiots, they're a step above mob justice and they generally have their own interests (similar to mine) at heart.
Err, in whose universe do they pay as much as programming?
Program managers and project managers usually earn more and need a lot of experience.
DBA is a good choice, still technical, well paid (often more so than programming), and not a waste of the guy's degree.
OTOH, he could always do what graduates of non-tech subjects do, the whole world of non-tech jobs is out there. He doesn't *have* to stick to computer stuff at all. The vast majority of graduates go into jobs that are nothing to do with their degrees.
"The French government and courts have a long history of issuing prejudiced laws and decisions in favor of French companies"
The US Government and courts have a long history of issuing prejudiced laws and decisions in favour of US companies (look at online gambling and a billion other things)
The British Government and courts have a long history of issuing prejudiced laws and decisions in favour of British companies (see the fiasco around BAE systems and the serious fraud office being stopped from investigating them for "National Security" reasons)
Everyone's at it. And the people of the whole world are the losers.
Here in the UK there's a lot of stuff on there that's cheaper than what you can buy in a "real" online store. Wii controllers for instance. There's a huge differential between the price for a UK wiimote and one shipped in from Hong Kong.
I'm also not sure about amazon marketplace sellers now. I know that the dispute procedure is a lot easier with amazon, but the market seems flooded with fake MS Pro Duo stuff and amazon don't sell them themselves. If you go to the page for them there's small print saying "supplied and sold by and when you checkout it's a marketplace thing.
I bought a "Sony" Memory Stick Pro Duo 8GB from ebay the other week.
It's a fake. Annoyed the hell out of me. It works and is 8GB but it's slow as hell.
Unfortunately I can't find a way to raise a dispute on ebay except "contact the seller", and when I try that it says the seller is no longer a member of ebay...
So yeah, it would be nice to have some assurance that what I'm buying is the real thing.
(I agree that this ruling is ridiculous if it allows companies to control resale of their goods, but getting counterfeits off ebay is worthwhile).
You know that you're never going to need them, right?
You could happily bludgeon a whole family to death with the model M and it's would still work. That thing is all that new cockroach-men will find from human civilisation 10 million years after we destroy ourselves in a nucleur holocaust.
"You are confused, my friend. An SSL certificate, like an earlier poster already pointed out, is only there to encrypt the traffic"
No, it isn't. This is utter bullshit. Go and read up on SSL and how it works. It's there to provide authentication. SSL/TLS provide three things - authentication, secrecy and integrity. Encryption is done using AES or DES (mostly) using keys that are either exchanged under asymmetric encryption (certificate) or more likely and more often using DH or DHE shared secret algorithms.
You can encrypt traffic and perform shared-secret key exhange without a certificate.
A certificate is NOTHING to do with encrypting the traffic. That's all done with symmetric AES or DES.
"It doesn't ensure identity and is not meant to do so regardless of what VERISIGN signup page tell you. THere is only one way to ensure that you are at the site you intend to: LOOK AT THE ADDRESS BAR. Its why its there for."
Yes, and the certificate contains verification (to a low but reasonable standard) that the server you are talking to is the legitimate holder of that address. Your address bar doesn't know about jim-bob in the net cafe next to you, running his own dhcp server and supplying poisoned DNS info. Or Alec at the ISP who's bored and decided to hack a few random SSL cxonnections with his man in the middle software.
Sorry, but I've read and implemented the SSL v3.1/TLS specifications and I know what I'm talking about on this one. I suggest you get informed before telling me I misunderstand.
Any idiot with a network jack can run their own dhcp server.
There are a lot of situations where it would be possible for someone just to plug in and compromise. You're right, it's beyond simple packet sniffing, but it's not leet haxxor territory either. It also assumes that nobody on the link from you to your server is corrupt and intercepting things.
Anyway, I see no reason, if you're going as far as creating a self signed certificate, for you not to go a stage further and create your own signing authority and import its public key as trusted. You don't have to pay anyone and it really isn't much more effort.
I'd also point out that there are authenticationless cipher suites within SSL that are perhaps better suited to this situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Except you're introducing a computer scanning/OCR stage when most people have trouble making a hole in a piece of paper.
Of course I've heard of stuffing the ballot box. That doesn't mean that such a thing is easier to achieve than, say, a biased company making closed source voting machines putting in a bit of code to ensure that their guy gets a better proportion of the vote than he would otherwise.
Stuffing the ballot box these days would require cross-party cooperation by observers and counters. Pretty unlikely, IMHO.
"Just make it available online"
And open it up to being hacked even more readily?
"so everyone can log in and check how/whether his/her vote is counted (after the elections)"
So that thugs/corporate masters/Mugabe can sit people down and check they voted 'correctly'?
"Paper trail is no easier to check. "
Yes it is, because the trail is there. With "Push button, increment counter" machines it's a different story.
"Do you propose to check all the votesheets manually?"
What do you think happens in a recount when the vote is contested?
"I think it's infeasible, you will need a computer anyway"
How do you think we did it before the rise of computers?
Why the hell would you bother with a seperate scanner?
Isn't that just introducing complexity and potential for massive amounts more errors?
Eh, no.
I'm going to need a citation on that. Cross party vote rigging in the UK or US is not something that's even been mooted as far as I'm aware.
Whilst the political classes do constantly fuck the people over, having two or more groups of power hungry asshats tends to keep them honest, or at least keeps them at each others' throats watching for the other(s) to screw up.
"Because it's so hard to simply rig the final result of counting"
Actually, yes, that is hard when you have observers and counters of all political colours involved. Compared to a hack or a fix in firmware of a whole set of machines that renders the fraud very hard to detect, yes, it's very hard to get the complicity of thousands of people from different parts of the political spectrum.
Yup, the government. You're forced to give them data and they keep losing it. Other than that I'd like to ask how it is that you can know in advance which company is going to lose your data?
It's only your responsibility to keep your details secure if you have prior knowledge of what's going to happen to them. This is one reason why there should be legal protections.
Another is that companies will often change their behaviour for the worse, especially in times of financial difficulty. There need to be legal provisions in place to stop them selling data on.
It's a lot more effort and you have a paper trail. With a machine all you have to do is rig the counter.
We have universal health care in my country too, and it's doing fine, thanks. There is no need to choose betwwen that and anything else.
What I really care about is not being at the mercy of the reactionary, stupid underclasses in this country.
I work for one of the "Big Guys".
We spend a lot of time looking at efficiency and trying to do more with what we've got. This is because we're interested in selling software for everyone's hardware and not just our own. You can't get everyone to switch to exclusively our stuff, but we can still get into their operations by being the best.
Yes, efficient budgets are in my interests.
OTOH, gay rights and not bringing back the death penalty, are two areas where the mob would probably be fiercely illiberal, but the political classes are not.
Again, I believe I have more in common with the educated and wealthy politicians than I do with the half of the population that have below average intelligence and believe what the tabloids tell them.
There's a lot wrong with politicians, and there's a lot wrong with my views (that effectively lead to a denial of self determination for the people), but I am better off without the morons being in charge.
"ou have an irrational belief that politician will somehow decide better in your interest than the majority of people (with which, by the way, you share more interests than with the politicians)."
Do I really?
As a well off, well educated, middle class professional, I have far more in common with the set of people in politics than I do with the slavering masses. Even when I disagree with them and think they're complete idiots, they're a step above mob justice and they generally have their own interests (similar to mine) at heart.
I always liked a black background and a foreground in mistyrose.
xterm -fn fixed -fg mistyrose -bg black
Jesus!
I'll wait until my holiday in the US to get a 901 then. In the UK they went on sale yesterday at £329
Err, in whose universe do they pay as much as programming?
Program managers and project managers usually earn more and need a lot of experience.
DBA is a good choice, still technical, well paid (often more so than programming), and not a waste of the guy's degree.
OTOH, he could always do what graduates of non-tech subjects do, the whole world of non-tech jobs is out there. He doesn't *have* to stick to computer stuff at all. The vast majority of graduates go into jobs that are nothing to do with their degrees.
"This is a refreshing antidote to the common arrogant assumption in the CS crowd that only they should be allowed to develop software."
It doesn't contradict that though, does it?
We can now refine it to "only us and not even all of us".
Who else do you suggest?
Cheers for that. I used a debit card (somewhat foolish I guess) but through paypal, so I have raised a dispute on there.
We'll see what happens.
"The French government and courts have a long history of issuing prejudiced laws and decisions in favor of French companies"
The US Government and courts have a long history of issuing prejudiced laws and decisions in favour of US companies (look at online gambling and a billion other things)
The British Government and courts have a long history of issuing prejudiced laws and decisions in favour of British companies (see the fiasco around BAE systems and the serious fraud office being stopped from investigating them for "National Security" reasons)
Everyone's at it. And the people of the whole world are the losers.
Ebay stores do indeed suck.
Here in the UK there's a lot of stuff on there that's cheaper than what you can buy in a "real" online store. Wii controllers for instance. There's a huge differential between the price for a UK wiimote and one shipped in from Hong Kong.
I'm also not sure about amazon marketplace sellers now. I know that the dispute procedure is a lot easier with amazon, but the market seems flooded with fake MS Pro Duo stuff and amazon don't sell them themselves. If you go to the page for them there's small print saying "supplied and sold by and when you checkout it's a marketplace thing.
Do not want.
yeah, it's a good thing to look out for.
"digital-stuff-uk" had a feedback rating of ~4500 though. Most likely they just got caught a little while before I noticed what was wrong.
I bought a "Sony" Memory Stick Pro Duo 8GB from ebay the other week.
It's a fake. Annoyed the hell out of me. It works and is 8GB but it's slow as hell.
Unfortunately I can't find a way to raise a dispute on ebay except "contact the seller", and when I try that it says the seller is no longer a member of ebay...
So yeah, it would be nice to have some assurance that what I'm buying is the real thing.
(I agree that this ruling is ridiculous if it allows companies to control resale of their goods, but getting counterfeits off ebay is worthwhile).
You know that you're never going to need them, right?
You could happily bludgeon a whole family to death with the model M and it's would still work. That thing is all that new cockroach-men will find from human civilisation 10 million years after we destroy ourselves in a nucleur holocaust.
Of course, I too have several. For some reason...
So does this stuff compete with things like HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli software?
"You are confused, my friend. An SSL certificate, like an earlier poster already pointed out, is only there to encrypt the traffic"
No, it isn't. This is utter bullshit. Go and read up on SSL and how it works. It's there to provide authentication. SSL/TLS provide three things - authentication, secrecy and integrity. Encryption is done using AES or DES (mostly) using keys that are either exchanged under asymmetric encryption (certificate) or more likely and more often using DH or DHE shared secret algorithms.
You can encrypt traffic and perform shared-secret key exhange without a certificate.
A certificate is NOTHING to do with encrypting the traffic. That's all done with symmetric AES or DES.
"It doesn't ensure identity and is not meant to do so regardless of what VERISIGN signup page tell you.
THere is only one way to ensure that you are at the site you intend to: LOOK AT THE ADDRESS BAR. Its why its there for."
Yes, and the certificate contains verification (to a low but reasonable standard) that the server you are talking to is the legitimate holder of that address. Your address bar doesn't know about jim-bob in the net cafe next to you, running his own dhcp server and supplying poisoned DNS info. Or Alec at the ISP who's bored and decided to hack a few random SSL cxonnections with his man in the middle software.
Sorry, but I've read and implemented the SSL v3.1/TLS specifications and I know what I'm talking about on this one. I suggest you get informed before telling me I misunderstand.
Any idiot with a network jack can run their own dhcp server.
There are a lot of situations where it would be possible for someone just to plug in and compromise. You're right, it's beyond simple packet sniffing, but it's not leet haxxor territory either. It also assumes that nobody on the link from you to your server is corrupt and intercepting things.
Anyway, I see no reason, if you're going as far as creating a self signed certificate, for you not to go a stage further and create your own signing authority and import its public key as trusted. You don't have to pay anyone and it really isn't much more effort.
I'd also point out that there are authenticationless cipher suites within SSL that are perhaps better suited to this situation.