This is a crude proposal. There are probably much better ones out there.
Yes, quite a few. They tend to run along the same lines, but with different approaches for ensuring, with high probability, that your ballot ID can't be tied to you.
If the Computer Science department learned about KISS design they wouldn't be in that problem... I don't know if I would want to hire a CS Student from MIT if they don't teach the KISS Concept...
The CS department does teach it. In 6.001 and 6.170 and 6.034 and...
But you see, the CS department doesn't build buildings. It doesn't commission buildings, and it doesn't make final decisions regarding buildings. That's the Institute administration's job. CSAIL and CS students routinely make fun of the clusterfuck that is Stata, and we have done so since Day One.
Now, Building 46, that's a good building. Damn you, Course 9!
As an occupant of the building, I have to say that it's not really buggy at all. There are very few bugs, in fact. The bigger problem is with the fucking mice. The building is so full of holes that mice (and pigeons, sometimes!) wander in.
What's ridiculous is that everything is done at once. If these terms are for the same length, have the State, County and Municipal positions done on a particular year, then two years later have the President, Representative, and Senator and then two years later have the State, etc.
Others have pointed out that some places do alternate the races. But there are reasons that many places don't alternate.
There is tremendous voter apathy already. One of the ways small local races can combat this is by attaching themselves to a big-ticket race, like the Presidential election. If the mayoral race is on the ballot in a 4N+1 year election, it's the biggest race on the ticket. But a lot of people don't care about the mayoral race, so turnout is low. If the mayoral race is on the ballot in a 4N year election, then the Presidential election draws out more voters. As long as they are at the polls, they might as well vote for the mayor, too.
Some places put small races on even-year ballots because it reduces the marginal effort that a voter has to expend to vote for that race. Does it cheapen our democracy? Yeah, probably. But until someone figures out how to change voter apathy on a massive scale (may I suggest a revolution, and a whole new Constitution?), that's the way things are.
Why do you need an entire day off to mark off a few boxes on a piece of paper? It only takes a few minutes and can be done on the way to work or the way home. Polls are usually open outside of "normal hours,"...
If your voting district has artificial barriers preventing people from voting quickly and easily, then your local government is to blame.
Like in Columbus, OH. Lines in predominantly-black precincts in Columbus and in Cleveland were absurdly long in 2004, with many people waiting more than 3 hours to cast their vote. A lot of people couldn't go during working hours, because they had to work, but the lines after hours became prohibitively long.
Some people may have to work for 12 or more hours on that day, for whatever reason, and so may not even have a chance to go to the polling place after hours. Not everyone works normal hours every day.
You gotta remember that not everybody has it as easy as you seem to. The voting process doesn't run smoothly everywhere... in some places the local or state government actually sucks a lot, and so it's not easy to vote.
so there's no excuse for not stopping by at some point during the day
No, there's no excuse for forcing people to wait in line until 10pm just to get in the door of the polling place. There's no excuse for making it non-trivial to cast a ballot. There's no excuse for our shoddy election system in this country.
Despite this astounding lack of excuses, all these things happen. I guess politics doesn't need excuses to fail miserably.
There are single Universities in the US that have more assigned IP addresses than pretty much the entire Asian continent! I think that there is actually a single University (or, shall we say, "Institute") that has that many IPs. But plenty of corporations or other organizations own Class A's as well.
We like our/8. Four static IPs for each student... a/16 for each dorm (with one exception -- my dorm gets two). And, more infuriatingly, I'm sure, a/16 for each fraternity. Is it fair? Fuck no. But dem's da breaks. I wouldn't count on reallocation of IPv4 addresses any sooner than I'd count on a move to IPv6.
The system also does not resolve one of the key points of HAVA - which, while deeply flawed, addresses some very deeply held concerns of disabled voters. That problem is one of ballot access - Punchscan is not disabled-friendly. It's no less unfriendly than current pen-and-paper systems, and is almost as easily adapted. Nothing prevents Punchscan from using Braille or some other method for assisting the visually-impaired.
So, the free and open source solution has won a competition. Well, the competition was only open to free and open source solutions. So that's not the important part.
Is the point now to somehow compel Diebold to seriously consider actually using this open source solution? Presumably, the point is that the publicity will let everybody know that a free, open source solution actually exists. It doesn't matter if Diebold adopts it, or somebody else, so long as somebody does.
And then after the election, cousin vinnie comes along and says "ok, now you prove that you voted for uncle enzo, or I break your kneecaps". Since you do have a method of proving who your vote was for, you're kinda stuck... This is exactly right. I can force you to surrender your private key. What if you refuse? My, eh, associates will break your legs.
How can I verify that the private key you provide is actually yours? Your odds of randomly guessing a valid private key are terrible, but it's trivial to verify that a private key is valid for some ballot. I can brute-force check every signed ballot against your private key.
If one of them does match, and the matching ballot shows that you didn't vote for my guy, my associates will break your legs.
If none of them matches, my associates will break your legs, and then probably give you a good kick in the face for trying to deceive me.
Sure, you could combat that by keeping record of which ballots, with their identifying numbers, were passed out, but if you're going to tamper with the election results, you could delete the vote from the count and the list, then when the voter complains their vote wasn't counted you could claim they faked their ballot...
You can make a copy of each receipt at the polling place and give it to one or more trusted third parties (e.g. the League of Women Voters, or the ACLU (supposing for the moment that none of these third parties is in league with The Terrorists)). Then multiple parties can detect that the ballot list was tampered with.
A simpler method is to make the ballots tamper- and forgery-resistant using existing technology found on personal checks.
Or you could encrypt the receipt number and print the resulting ciphertext on the receipt. This prevents anybody from faking a receipt without the encryption secret key. (Alternatively, use a cryptographic hash with a secret salt.) This requires that a trusted third party perform random ballot audits to ensure that the pre-printed receipt number plaintexts and ciphertexts correspond.
As far as DHCP needing registered MACs, you're half right. If you need your computer to only use one IP address, then yes, you would need to "lock-in" a MAC address to that IP in the DHCP configuration. If you don't mind who gets what IP, you can just set up a pool of addresses and let DHCP assign leases to those addresses for a period of time -- not good for something such as a web server. The latter is what most home routers do for wired connections.
The parent poster is a student at MIT. You're obviously not.
He doesn't mean ITS. He means IST, the on-campus group that keeps the networks running. They have little cars that they use to run around campus and fix stuff that breaks.
As for needing to register MACs, he's talking about the MIT network specifically, not DHCP in general, so he's completely right, not half right. The MIT wireless will refuse to hand you an IP address until you register your MAC and provide credentials (either by logging in, or by identifying yourself as a visitor). Students have to clone the MAC addresses of DS's and Wiis temporarily so that they can register those MACs in order to get them on the network.
Look at how much spqace MIT has. Now, look at how much space the whole of Africa has. Even if we assigned every last block, we would probably never see an African university with a whole/8 to itself. Think about how many people are in India and China, and compare the asian assignment vs. the US assignment. It will be impossible to ever make IPv4 fair. IPv6 allows us to just bypass the whole issue and let everybody have as much address space as they could possibly use.
"Fair" is an odd word to be using. Does "fair" mean that every region has the same number of IP addresses per capita?
MIT has the infrastructure and resources to actually use a lot of IP space, whereas Africa doesn't. North American and Europe have a huge headstart on Internet infrastructure, and so they ought to get more IP space, regardless of population.
Now, admittedly, MIT doesn't need a whole class A. But my dorm has two class B's to itself, and regardless of whether that's necessary or not (hint: it's not), it's still fun to brag about. Take that, Harvard!
The Science Museum is one of those institutions that would be still standing even after the rest of Boston caves in and collapses.
Thanks to the Mass. Turnpike Authority, this theory might be tested soon.
Re:Obvious, simple anti-phishing solution?
on
Dealing with Phishing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Bank of America did this for a while. The first line of any e-mail they sent to you was "Authorization Phrase: %s", where %s was the phrase that the user entered on the website when entering their e-mail address.
Suddenly, they stopped doing this around March 2005. I haven't a clue why.
Whoops! Then I guess I shouldn't post this link...
But yes, Walter Lewin's lectures were fantastic. It's a shame that he doesn't do freshman physics anymore, with the advent of the s/learning/technology/g program (a.k.a. TEAL). I think the move to make his old 8.01 lectures available was in part to provide a good resource to those students who don't like TEAL and who don't learn well in that environment.
They also have the videos of all the lectures. I've been going through them slowly; they really make you think.
Those lectures are from 1986! The course content has changed a fair amount since then, although mostly it's a matter of the order in which they are taught.
Anyway, in recent terms, we've opted for the lower-bandwidth option (not that we usually worry about bandwidth here) of lecture slides with accompanying audio clips. This also means that lecture attendance has dropped severely.
Mmm, Goodale 210. Right next to the kitchen! That room is now a nice green color. The heavy bag is gone, but now there's a lofted couch, a projector and screen, and The Big Board.
We don't field a lot of IM teams any more. That seems to be 5th West's job these days.
Yes, it is still called the Beast from the East, but we don't know why. Do you? Let us know at donkeykong dot mit dot edu slash w slash History
Is it useful? I would think that a processor as old as the Alpha wouldn't be that useful even if you did have sixteen of them. They were pretty awesome in their time though.
You're more or less right. Right now, four of them are crunching away with distributed.net, and the other twelve are pretty much doing nothing.
One more Alpha is serving up pictures and a wiki, and occasionally withstanding partial Slashdottings. We actually have 19 Alpha processors on the hall in total, which is probably way too many. Next step: collecting Sun Ultra 5's.
It's all a nice setup, but when happens when these kids have to move out of that dorm? (Due to a pile of dirty laundry growing legs and chewing on wires)
If they want, they don't have to move out for three years. On most halls at East Campus, you can squat your room as long as you want (except that they'll probably have to keep squatting it as a double).
I bet everything has been screwed or nailed in, modified and altered to accommodate all this equipment. Who allowed them to do this?
Joe Graham. ("Kids making illegal modifications to their rooms? I'm on it!")
Last time I checked you weren't allowed to mess around with dorm rooms.
At East Campus, you actually are allowed to mess around with dorm rooms. Murals are painted everywhere, and all sorts of cool shit happens. The building is so old that nobody cares anymore, except for the Cambridge Fire Department. And if you keep the room's door locked during inspection, they don't have to know about it.
Nice system and all, but -10 practicality. Maybe it would have worked better in a house or apartment. They should have worked more in how it looked and how it was to be set up instead of just building it.
Yeah, but by the time they live in a house or apartment, they won't have the free time to do this kind of stuff. Heck, next term they probably won't have that kind of time.
Any congresscritter proposing legislation involving technology should have to show credit from MIT for a recent course in computing/electrical engineering.
Are you kidding? We don't want those bastards around here! They wouldn't even help bring down the curve because the relevant course (6.004) is graded on an absolute scale...
Slashdot Mirror
This is a crude proposal. There are probably much better ones out there.
Yes, quite a few. They tend to run along the same lines, but with different approaches for ensuring, with high probability, that your ballot ID can't be tied to you.
See ThreeBallot (and variants), for example. Others include Scantegrity II, which has gotten a fair amount of attention recently.
No, that really did happen. Seriously.
... Yes, they do!
If the Computer Science department learned about KISS design they wouldn't be in that problem... I don't know if I would want to hire a CS Student from MIT if they don't teach the KISS Concept...
...
The CS department does teach it. In 6.001 and 6.170 and 6.034 and
But you see, the CS department doesn't build buildings. It doesn't commission buildings, and it doesn't make final decisions regarding buildings. That's the Institute administration's job. CSAIL and CS students routinely make fun of the clusterfuck that is Stata, and we have done so since Day One.
Now, Building 46, that's a good building. Damn you, Course 9!
As an occupant of the building, I have to say that it's not really buggy at all. There are very few bugs, in fact. The bigger problem is with the fucking mice. The building is so full of holes that mice (and pigeons, sometimes!) wander in.
But why go barefoot? The guy probably wears shoes outside his home, so why take them off to get on stage and deliver a speech to respected academics?
What home? No, seriously.
What's ridiculous is that everything is done at once. If these terms are for the same length, have the State, County and Municipal positions done on a particular year, then two years later have the President, Representative, and Senator and then two years later have the State, etc.
Others have pointed out that some places do alternate the races. But there are reasons that many places don't alternate.
There is tremendous voter apathy already. One of the ways small local races can combat this is by attaching themselves to a big-ticket race, like the Presidential election. If the mayoral race is on the ballot in a 4N+1 year election, it's the biggest race on the ticket. But a lot of people don't care about the mayoral race, so turnout is low. If the mayoral race is on the ballot in a 4N year election, then the Presidential election draws out more voters. As long as they are at the polls, they might as well vote for the mayor, too.
Some places put small races on even-year ballots because it reduces the marginal effort that a voter has to expend to vote for that race. Does it cheapen our democracy? Yeah, probably. But until someone figures out how to change voter apathy on a massive scale (may I suggest a revolution, and a whole new Constitution?), that's the way things are.
Why do you need an entire day off to mark off a few boxes on a piece of paper? It only takes a few minutes and can be done on the way to work or the way home. Polls are usually open outside of "normal hours," ...
If your voting district has artificial barriers preventing people from voting quickly and easily, then your local government is to blame.
Like in Columbus, OH. Lines in predominantly-black precincts in Columbus and in Cleveland were absurdly long in 2004, with many people waiting more than 3 hours to cast their vote. A lot of people couldn't go during working hours, because they had to work, but the lines after hours became prohibitively long.
Some people may have to work for 12 or more hours on that day, for whatever reason, and so may not even have a chance to go to the polling place after hours. Not everyone works normal hours every day.
You gotta remember that not everybody has it as easy as you seem to. The voting process doesn't run smoothly everywhere... in some places the local or state government actually sucks a lot, and so it's not easy to vote.
so there's no excuse for not stopping by at some point during the day
No, there's no excuse for forcing people to wait in line until 10pm just to get in the door of the polling place. There's no excuse for making it non-trivial to cast a ballot. There's no excuse for our shoddy election system in this country.
Despite this astounding lack of excuses, all these things happen. I guess politics doesn't need excuses to fail miserably.
Ask and ye shall receive: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7172438422 483406719
We like our
How can I verify that the private key you provide is actually yours? Your odds of randomly guessing a valid private key are terrible, but it's trivial to verify that a private key is valid for some ballot. I can brute-force check every signed ballot against your private key.
If one of them does match, and the matching ballot shows that you didn't vote for my guy, my associates will break your legs.
If none of them matches, my associates will break your legs, and then probably give you a good kick in the face for trying to deceive me.
Sure, you could combat that by keeping record of which ballots, with their identifying numbers, were passed out, but if you're going to tamper with the election results, you could delete the vote from the count and the list, then when the voter complains their vote wasn't counted you could claim they faked their ballot...
You can make a copy of each receipt at the polling place and give it to one or more trusted third parties (e.g. the League of Women Voters, or the ACLU (supposing for the moment that none of these third parties is in league with The Terrorists)). Then multiple parties can detect that the ballot list was tampered with.
A simpler method is to make the ballots tamper- and forgery-resistant using existing technology found on personal checks.
Or you could encrypt the receipt number and print the resulting ciphertext on the receipt. This prevents anybody from faking a receipt without the encryption secret key. (Alternatively, use a cryptographic hash with a secret salt.) This requires that a trusted third party perform random ballot audits to ensure that the pre-printed receipt number plaintexts and ciphertexts correspond.
IST? Are you sure you don't mean ITS?
As far as DHCP needing registered MACs, you're half right. If you need your computer to only use one IP address, then yes, you would need to "lock-in" a MAC address to that IP in the DHCP configuration. If you don't mind who gets what IP, you can just set up a pool of addresses and let DHCP assign leases to those addresses for a period of time -- not good for something such as a web server. The latter is what most home routers do for wired connections.
The parent poster is a student at MIT. You're obviously not.
He doesn't mean ITS. He means IST, the on-campus group that keeps the networks running. They have little cars that they use to run around campus and fix stuff that breaks.
As for needing to register MACs, he's talking about the MIT network specifically, not DHCP in general, so he's completely right, not half right. The MIT wireless will refuse to hand you an IP address until you register your MAC and provide credentials (either by logging in, or by identifying yourself as a visitor). Students have to clone the MAC addresses of DS's and Wiis temporarily so that they can register those MACs in order to get them on the network.
Look at how much spqace MIT has. Now, look at how much space the whole of Africa has. Even if we assigned every last block, we would probably never see an African university with a whole /8 to itself. Think about how many people are in India and China, and compare the asian assignment vs. the US assignment. It will be impossible to ever make IPv4 fair. IPv6 allows us to just bypass the whole issue and let everybody have as much address space as they could possibly use.
"Fair" is an odd word to be using. Does "fair" mean that every region has the same number of IP addresses per capita?
MIT has the infrastructure and resources to actually use a lot of IP space, whereas Africa doesn't. North American and Europe have a huge headstart on Internet infrastructure, and so they ought to get more IP space, regardless of population.
Now, admittedly, MIT doesn't need a whole class A. But my dorm has two class B's to itself, and regardless of whether that's necessary or not (hint: it's not), it's still fun to brag about. Take that, Harvard!
The Science Museum is one of those institutions that would be still standing even after the rest of Boston caves in and collapses.
Thanks to the Mass. Turnpike Authority, this theory might be tested soon.
Bank of America did this for a while. The first line of any e-mail they sent to you was "Authorization Phrase: %s", where %s was the phrase that the user entered on the website when entering their e-mail address.
Suddenly, they stopped doing this around March 2005. I haven't a clue why.
Whoops! Then I guess I shouldn't post this link...
But yes, Walter Lewin's lectures were fantastic. It's a shame that he doesn't do freshman physics anymore, with the advent of the s/learning/technology/g program (a.k.a. TEAL). I think the move to make his old 8.01 lectures available was in part to provide a good resource to those students who don't like TEAL and who don't learn well in that environment.
They also have the videos of all the lectures. I've been going through them slowly; they really make you think.
Those lectures are from 1986! The course content has changed a fair amount since then, although mostly it's a matter of the order in which they are taught.
Anyway, in recent terms, we've opted for the lower-bandwidth option (not that we usually worry about bandwidth here) of lecture slides with accompanying audio clips. This also means that lecture attendance has dropped severely.
Mmm, Goodale 210. Right next to the kitchen! That room is now a nice green color. The heavy bag is gone, but now there's a lofted couch, a projector and screen, and The Big Board.
We don't field a lot of IM teams any more. That seems to be 5th West's job these days.
Yes, it is still called the Beast from the East, but we don't know why. Do you? Let us know at donkeykong dot mit dot edu slash w slash History
Is it useful? I would think that a processor as old as the Alpha wouldn't be that useful even if you did have sixteen of them. They were pretty awesome in their time though.
You're more or less right. Right now, four of them are crunching away with distributed.net, and the other twelve are pretty much doing nothing.
One more Alpha is serving up pictures and a wiki, and occasionally withstanding partial Slashdottings. We actually have 19 Alpha processors on the hall in total, which is probably way too many. Next step: collecting Sun Ultra 5's.
It's all a nice setup, but when happens when these kids have to move out of that dorm? (Due to a pile of dirty laundry growing legs and chewing on wires)
If they want, they don't have to move out for three years. On most halls at East Campus, you can squat your room as long as you want (except that they'll probably have to keep squatting it as a double).
I bet everything has been screwed or nailed in, modified and altered to accommodate all this equipment. Who allowed them to do this?
Joe Graham. ("Kids making illegal modifications to their rooms? I'm on it!")
Last time I checked you weren't allowed to mess around with dorm rooms.
At East Campus, you actually are allowed to mess around with dorm rooms. Murals are painted everywhere, and all sorts of cool shit happens. The building is so old that nobody cares anymore, except for the Cambridge Fire Department. And if you keep the room's door locked during inspection, they don't have to know about it.
Nice system and all, but -10 practicality. Maybe it would have worked better in a house or apartment. They should have worked more in how it looked and how it was to be set up instead of just building it.
Yeah, but by the time they live in a house or apartment, they won't have the free time to do this kind of stuff. Heck, next term they probably won't have that kind of time.
Any congresscritter proposing legislation involving technology should have to show credit from MIT for a recent course in computing/electrical engineering.
Are you kidding? We don't want those bastards around here! They wouldn't even help bring down the curve because the relevant course (6.004) is graded on an absolute scale...
Oh come now, surely you can conceive it.
So, what you really meant to say was: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."