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User: AK+Marc

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  1. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    Voting is anonymous (we've found that any other method tried is worse).

    So Congress uses the worst possible voting method. Also, the country was founded on open voting, when anonymous voting had been tried before. Why? Open voting worked great for the USA, up until the Civil War.

    Your money is more important than your vote is the message you are giving. Multiple verified checks on money is a good thing, but for a vote, give it a try and walk away without any proof it was tallied correctly, or even at all.

    Stolen money can be returned. Stolen votes are another matter. Once a candidate is sworn in, it's really not possible to fix the election.

    With verified votes, you could have a re-election completed in about the same time or faster than a recount of your anonymous vote, and the re-election would be more accurate than your re-count. When every step is verified, any break-down is immediately visible.

  2. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    And what proof do you have that the machine you feed the vote in doesn't reject 10% of valid votes for McCain, programmed to do so to cause apathy and disinterest in those who would vote for him? What proof do you have that it recorded the vote as you intended? Why would you ever need a recount if the machines were accurate?

  3. Re:WTF on Is Earth Weighed Down By Dark Matter? · · Score: 2

    If it were a more uniform cloud around the Earth, not a "ring" like Saturns, then it would be hard to find. The effects wouldn't be fully visible until one was beyond it. And I don't know whether any of the probes sent out looked back at Earth for any gravitational changes.

  4. Re:In which units? on Polar Vortex Sends Life-Threatening Freeze To US · · Score: 1

    What the hell does "twice as cold" even mean?

    Twice the rate of heat loss. Seemed obvious to me.

  5. Re:No they definitely are not better on Polar Vortex Sends Life-Threatening Freeze To US · · Score: 1

    8 winters in Alaska on all-seasons worked for me, in an AWD Subaru WRX. The only time I got stuck, I was high-sided on a snow bank, with a spotter who kept telling me to keep going, well after I should have stopped. I did manage a self-extraction (with shovels and sand). Even on ice and deep snow, all-seasons worked fine. With studs you can pretty much drive like normal in most cars. Blizzaks are a waste. If you want that level of performance, "regular" snow tires with studs will beat you ever time. The only time they are good is if you want quiet. Studs are surprisingly loud, and that bothers some people.

  6. Re:Bollocks on Why a Cure For Cancer Is So Elusive · · Score: 1

    Most of the animals I've owned have died of cancer (being put down after a diagnosis counts). When you live a long and comfortable life, you have to eventually die of something. The ones that stepped in front of a car didn't last to cancer age. My 20 year old "outdoor" cat did. Though no necropsy was done on the smaller ones, fish, hamsters, so no idea what the sub-cat animals died of. But cat/dog in my family had a higher cancer rate.

  7. Re:Genetic rewriting on Why a Cure For Cancer Is So Elusive · · Score: 1

    Does the tattoo glow green?

  8. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    Most of the problems with SSL are from chains of trust. A voting application wouldn't need any of them.

    The certificates couldn't be signed by Verisign, but must be issued by the Elections Commission - there goes that means of attack.

    Since a user isn't putting in a URL, then use fixed IPs, rather than DNS. Oh, there goes another vector of attack.

    "It's hard to do things right" means "I don't want to do things right." It's not hard to do things right. Find the vulnerabilities, and fix them. It doesn't need to be complex. Making it more secure than the current voting system is a pretty low bar. Having a truck drive down the road that you throw your vote folded like a paper airplane at is about the security of the current system.

  9. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 0

    This makes no sense. Voting anonymity is to protect against the very real and possible threat that you can intimidate people into voting a particular way, by confirming how they voted after the fact.

    Anonymity doesn't protect from that. Did you not read my example from when anonymous voting was started in the US? The ballot workers would "verify" your vote was correctly cast, and spoil any ballot that didn't match what they wanted. Anonymity doesn't work when you have voter rolls. The rolls spoil anonymity. You must "trust" the poll workers to not associate your ballot with your name. They can, and they did. Anonymous doesn't work. I can't understand how a system with so many known pitfalls is still adhered to by so many as the "obvious" answer. Congress doesn't use it. Why should we? Why does Congress always get the best public health care and best retirement plans, opting out of medicare, ACA, SS, while imposing it on us. The same applies to voting. Congressional votes are open votes, and that works fine for making sure there are no misunderstandings or mis-votes. Eliminates that entirely. If a vote is mis-cast, it is corrected in real time. Clean, efficient, and much better than anonymous, where you'll see more votes cast than eligible voters, and other "proof" of fraud, yet people do nothing. It baffles me.

    People would rather take known guaranteed vote fraud, than change the vote slightly to reduce fraud.

  10. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    You can't coerce an open vote?

    I said "You can't cheat a vote that's 1:1 tied to a human. The only way to do so is buy the human."

    I never said it can't be rigged. Why are you asserting I said something I didn't, when everyone can just re-read it for themselves?

    The game is simple: give everyone a vote, but make sure they are under intense pressure to "spend it" the way you want.

    So you think the US is less mature of a country than Venezuela?

    I wouldn't touch an ipad/android voting machine at all. They're already tracking me six ways to sunday; it would be a piece of cake for that voting software to also send to the "right people" how I voted. Game over man, game over.

    They "could" track you with anonymous voting now. It's trivial. Numbered ballots are supposedly there to reduce fraud, but don't. They could be used to read voter order, then track back to the voter, if vote order was captured, and I've seen plenty of pollsters outside with cameras, talking to people leaving the polling place, or other points of surveillance that could determine it. Not 100%, but in today's age of data correlation engines, down to trivial. Don't forget, most poling places have a scanner that reads your vote while you are standing there.

    Just because you don't understand the other options doesn't make them bad.

  11. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    Anonymous voting worked in the Soviet Union, they also got 99.9% of the vote.

    Too bad you live in sutchch a 3rd world shithole that your dictator kills you if you vote poorly.

  12. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    "You will sign this absentee voter ballot and leave it with me. If I find out it is discarded later because you voted in person on the day, I'll break your kneecaps."

    My statement wasn't that verified voting was foolproof, but that it doesn't allow for any "new" subversion, and fixes many current ones.

  13. Re:NSA's response on Senator Bernie Sanders Asks NSA If Agency Is Spying On Congress · · Score: 1

    Unverified information with no sources might not be as damning as you assert.

  14. Re:Just like Joe McCarthy says on Senator Bernie Sanders Asks NSA If Agency Is Spying On Congress · · Score: 1

    KKK members weren't blacklisted, yet your response is the same as if I has said so. As your response is unrelated to mine, I can only presume you are not discussing anything, but simply lecturing me because my opinion is different than yours, so I need re-education.

    Do you have a cite for the ACP killing more than the KKK? "Certainly" as if it should be common knowledge. Yet I can't find a single instance of a mob-style attack where the members all knew what they were there for (a lynching or whatever). There are some cases of directed attacks done by a trained operative that was "linked" to them. But in your analogy, we should fear all Irish because the IRA existed. Being a member of a group doesn't indicate condonement of all actions of said group.

  15. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    The reason open voting is better than your suggestion is that it still relies on someone else counting your vote outside your presence. What if the vote cheating was a single machine in a single precinct being sabotaged to make the marks in the wrong line, swapping two candidates. So you go to your competitor's stronghold, and steal some small number of votes, but enough to sway the election. The polling is accurate enough to give a good idea of the minimum needed to sway an election, so as to reduce the chance of being caught.

    When your vote is officially counted outside your presence, then you can *never* know how your vote is counted. That is an inherent error in the anonymous system. I want the official count verified, before I leave the booth. Open voting can give that. Anonymous can't.

  16. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    So make that a law change when the balloting systems are changed, also requiring a law change. I've never heard of such a happening, but I'm sure it does. My boss used to make fun of my politics all the time. I was the only non-Republican in the department. I'm libertarian (no, not Libertarian), and they took that as communist, as do most conservatives.

  17. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    You can also bully or otherwise coerce the same human, which is what the anonymity was meant to prevent.

    Yes, that's why when anonymity was first instituted, your vote was anonymous, but had to be shown to the polling master, who could then destroy it, rather than count it, and make a mark by your name so your anonymous ballot would not be given to you next time.

    No, anonymity didn't solve that one. I'm not claiming open voting solves it any better, but it isn't any worse than anonymous.

    So, your proposal is to abolish the voting anonymity... Interesting, but I'm not sure, I like that.

    My proposal is to institute vote tracking, which eliminates anonymity. Anonymity itself isn't the target, but tracking, so that vote counting is verified for every vote. The count in Florida that was so horrible it demanded a revote, but there wasn't time. The problem was chads. Pregnant, hanging, dimpled. When you can vote, and not know how your vote is counted, the system doesn't work. How is such a system allowed at all? I can't see it better than tracked voting in any way. When you can add invalid ballots to a box, the system is broken. When valid votes can be invalidated over misunderstandings of intentions, the system is broken. e-voting would never have taken hold if the system wasn't so broken.

    When I get proof of how my vote was counted before leaving the ballot box, along with a receipt that lets me check it or re-vote it (currently, a fraud trick is to poll people leaving polls, then if you have a big loss in an area, spoil all the votes from there - break a seal on a box or something that invalidates it - but that would fail if 10,000 votes casually discarded to spoil an election could be re-voted with the original people re-casting the original votes).

    All the drawbacks of tracked votes apply to absentee voting, yet I haven't heard of any such issues with them. Why not?

  18. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    You are disagreeing, but not addressing what I said. When such violent agreement is arrived at on the Internet, one can only assume that you agree 100% with what I said, but disagree with the tone or implications. Thank you for agreeing with me and supporting me so strongly.

  19. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    So it's never been cracked, but has been worked around. SSL doesn't prevent every MITM attack. I never said it did. I asserted it has never been "cracked". I did mention a few MITMs that have succeeded, but most of those are trivial to detect, for an educated user.

  20. Re:Cancer isn't one disease on Why a Cure For Cancer Is So Elusive · · Score: 1

    So a broken finger and a broken leg are the same problem? They are diagnosed and treated differently, so even if you want to call them one disease "broken bone" they are treated as separate diseases by doctors and hospitals, and considered different by the entire medical profession.

    Whether your mesothelioma is asbestos or genetic is not an issue for the doctors after diagnosis, but the lawyers. The "cause" is separate from the disease. Separating the causes allows for better identification and targeting of causes to increase prevention. For cause identification, they should be separated. For treatment, it depends on the treatments. Some types are more succeptible to some treatments, so the diseases are often grouped by their similarities, not arbitrarily.

  21. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    When has an ISP or router ever cracked SSL? Never, but a DNS attack, along with user error has resulted in near equivalence? I don't need to trust anyone in the middle. I don't when doing banking, no loss yet. So why is it an issue with voting?

  22. Re:So now... on University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone · · Score: 1

    You can't rig an open vote. There are two reasons the votes in Congress are open. One, so that the constituents can see how their Congressman voted, and two, to eliminate vote fraud. You can't cheat a vote that's 1:1 tied to a human. The only way to do so is buy the human. The USA was founded on open voting, and that worked fine, up until a little Civil War. If we adopted it again, it'd eliminate 9.9% of today's fraud, and not introduce any new types of fraud not possible today.

    The "fix" is simpler, easier, and cheaper than today's voting system, and would fix most of what's wrong with it. But people fear change, and the politicians fear not being able to buy an election through fraud, so we'll never see it.

  23. Re: America, FUCK YEAH! on US Coast Guard Ship To Attempt Rescue of 2 Icebreakers In Antarctica · · Score: 1

    Have you never heard Yogi Berra? "nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." All it takes are a few critics to see it and share the contents with us, and everyone knows, critics aren't people.

  24. Re:Just like Joe McCarthy says on Senator Bernie Sanders Asks NSA If Agency Is Spying On Congress · · Score: 1

    David Duke wasn't blacklisted. He was an actual leader in the KKK, and refused to answer reasonable questions about his involvement and actions related to that, and people running for office are expected to be more open than that, so he lost that, and later elections. I haven't followed him since, but I've been a hiring manager and never saw his name on the "do not hire" list (and yes, there was an official one, mainly containing the names of former employees who left under less than ideal circumstances).

    Note that the backlash from some of that against Democrats who voted for something racist back in the '50s/60s didn't seem to kill any careers, though did get some more firm denouncements of past beliefs/actions. Unlike the Republicans with a similar past, who seem more likely to stand by it, as if they are infallible, and if they ever did do something, it *must* be right.

  25. Re:NSA's response on Senator Bernie Sanders Asks NSA If Agency Is Spying On Congress · · Score: 1

    And the president wouldn't have the political sense to point the finger at the NSA?