- Some other sort of coordinated effort with geeks trying to find out which Apple employee might have the phone. Find out where the phones are developed, determine which employees work in fields with access to the iPhones, chat up those 1-2 dozen employees until you find one with the phone.
Lesson learned: never bring a hot iPhone to a sex-date.
even assuming foul play, pickpocketing != robbery.
robbery implies threats of violence. You can bet, if there was robbery involved, the victim would have come forth. Pickpocketing, on the other hand, the victim might not yet have noticed.
Rather obvious yeah, so because it's not obvious to you immediately it does not happen in western countries?
No matter how many times I read that sentence, it doesn't make sense. I suppose it's meant to be a miffed reaction at my astonishment about the non-subtlety of electoral fraud in India? If so, I'm sorry to have offended you.
Look at the following list of the many means of fraud and tell me they are not used in so called 'true democracies': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_fraud [wikipedia.org]
Why should I tell you something like that? Yes, this is a list of frauds for people who are concerned about stealth and/or plausible deniability. That's why brute force approaches such as just invading the polling station is not included there.
The sentence that I liked most was: Harsh penalties aimed at deterring electoral fraud make it likely that individuals who perpetrate fraud do so with the expectation that it either will not be discovered or will be excused..
Netherlands - last election there were people instructing others how to vote in the booth (which was strangely allowed by officials present)
A similar thing had happened a while back at the election of a student council at a US university. There the rational was to "help" students who might have trouble figuring out the ballot. Plausible deniability. Or true naivity of the organisers.
they counted over 100 mystery extra votes (this was in a district where is was a very close call so this could make a difference)
Either a true counting error, or a fraud meant to look like one.
United Kingdom - last election hundreds of people were denied right to vote at the polling booths (more people turned up than planned so they just told them to walk away), no action was taken.
Probably true lack of organization... Unless it can be shown that only precincts "leaning" a certain way were affected (as happened in Florida when Bush was first "elected").
United States - several elections with blatant fraud: 'numerous statistical analysis showed discrepancy in the number of votes Bush received"', no action was taken (in fact Bush was allowed to rule unquestioned twice).
Statistical analysis, but no "hard and fast" fact.
As shown by above examples, in Western countries, if there is fraud, the fraudsters usually builds up a more or less elaborate scheme that should:
help prevent the fraud from getting discovered
in the event that it is discovered, provide plausible alternate "explanations" (such as honest mistakes, lack of organizational skills, conspiracy theories by losing parties,...)
The Indian "poll booth hijacking" is so egregious by its open-ness because it leaves the fraudster no way to weasel himself out of the accusations, should he get caught. To me, this means that the democratic culture there is so low (sorry to say so) that nobody cares about fraud, even if it is perpetrated in the open.
What stops people from selling their vote and going to the polling booth to vote?
Easy: the buyer has no way of verifying that the seller did indeed vote how he promised to vote.
it makes it *very* easy for people to disrupt, influence or plainly destroy votes there. Someone in this thread already pointed out practices like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing [wikipedia.org].
Such practices are...hmmm... rather obvious. Meaning, that in a really democratic country, they would lead to instant cancellation of the election, and punishment of the perps.
If such brute force disruptions are commonplace in India, then security of electronic elections is indeed the least of their worries. Without punishment of obvious abuse, the crooks could just wheel a supercomputer into the polling station, collect all the electronic ballot pads, openly break their seals, and reflash whatever firmware they want into them, hand them back (or just hand their own devices back which don't even need to look like the original ones...), and move on to the next polling station. No need to worry about stealth and miniaturized flash Ram writers if nobody cares about open tampering.
Security (... any kind of security...) only makes sense if there is a meaningful followup to obvious tampering. And how much more obvious than Booth capturing can you get? You're basically taking a whole polling station hostage, and there is no consequence to this? *Mind boggles*
The problems with "voting at home" (or "at work") do have nothing to do with the lack of security of the web, but more with the lack of guaranteed privacy.
If you allow voting from work, who guarantees that the manager is not standing behind his employees, making sure that they vote the "right way". Or, at home, that the spouse isn't making similar enforcement. Or at the pub, that a buddy isn't promising a beer in exchange for the "good" vote...
As long as you allow voting away from designated polling stations, you can exclude neither voting under duress nor vote selling.
That's not how the line "no system is 100% secure" is usually used.
Usually, it's being trotten out by poor security professionals to justify not bothering because "as no system can be secure, why bother attempting to secure one?"
Around here, they do those handy leather pouches with a keyring inside, and which close with a zipper or buttoned flap.
While you still might need to trim down on the number of keys you carry, at least this will protect your pockets, and any mobile that may be sharing a pocket with your keys.
And some of these pouches even have an additional smaller compartment that is handy for items such as USB keys.
Without resorting to rules written by the user, are there any e-mail clients that give the user a very solid notification that some e-mail address that doesn't end up at them is not in the "To:" or "Cc:" fields?
Not so easy, as any mail sent to a (mailman or majordomo) mailing list would look the same (user neither in To:, nor in Cc:), and we wouldn't want to put up a noisy warning just for replying to a mailing list message...
Or maybe lists could be identified in a different way? Sometimes Thunderbird shows a "reply to list" button, so how does it find out?
In that case, the rule would be "if user neither in To: nor in Cc:, and if it is not a list either, loudly warn when attempting to reply"
If you don't know what you're doing, you can cause a lot of harm. If you send out a message to a ton of clients and use CC instead of BCC....
And another favorite: Idiot doing a reply-all to a Mail that was Bcc'ed to him... (with the result that now all the others in Cc: and To: know about him being Bcc'ed...)
I know that there are some things that I would like on the test. It drives me nuts how many people don't know how to send screenshots around.
Indeed, the answer can be summed in 3 words: "not at all".
When you get a piece of text on a web page you want me to know about, just send me the text. I don't want a screenshot of the text.
And some idiots even manage to send a screenshot of a partially obscured error message. How useful is that? Had they just copy-pasted the text, it would have been complete.
But part of the "screenshot" problem is that so many helpdesks actually ask for them, even where it doesn't make any sense at all (such as "your website is very slow", answer: "could you send me a screenshot?")
No, because they won't sell any tickets to a blind man. Indeed, they use Ticketpod as their sole ticket outlet, and ticketpod only supports ordering via a proprietary flash applet which conveniently shuts out any blind person and his screen reader or braille line.
However, you're more than welcome to bring a gay dog:-)
Monitors should be positioned such that someone walking by can't see what's on the screen...
hehe... I'm sure that developers prefer it that way, but their managers care more about productivity. An being able to sneak up on somebody certainly increases the amount of work done, and decreases the amount of "research".
Slashdot Mirror
- Some other sort of coordinated effort with geeks trying to find out which Apple employee might have the phone. Find out where the phones are developed, determine which employees work in fields with access to the iPhones, chat up those 1-2 dozen employees until you find one with the phone.
Lesson learned: never bring a hot iPhone to a sex-date.
robbery implies threats of violence. You can bet, if there was robbery involved, the victim would have come forth. Pickpocketing, on the other hand, the victim might not yet have noticed.
Long expired
And if there electronics is delicate enough, they might be fried from a bigger distance than the human brain.
You have to make H while the sun shines.
And where the sun doesn't shine, you can always make CH4...
Rather obvious yeah, so because it's not obvious to you immediately it does not happen in western countries?
No matter how many times I read that sentence, it doesn't make sense. I suppose it's meant to be a miffed reaction at my astonishment about the non-subtlety of electoral fraud in India? If so, I'm sorry to have offended you.
Look at the following list of the many means of fraud and tell me they are not used in so called 'true democracies': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_fraud [wikipedia.org]
Why should I tell you something like that? Yes, this is a list of frauds for people who are concerned about stealth and/or plausible deniability. That's why brute force approaches such as just invading the polling station is not included there.
The sentence that I liked most was: Harsh penalties aimed at deterring electoral fraud make it likely that individuals who perpetrate fraud do so with the expectation that it either will not be discovered or will be excused..
Netherlands - last election there were people instructing others how to vote in the booth (which was strangely allowed by officials present)
A similar thing had happened a while back at the election of a student council at a US university. There the rational was to "help" students who might have trouble figuring out the ballot. Plausible deniability. Or true naivity of the organisers.
they counted over 100 mystery extra votes (this was in a district where is was a very close call so this could make a difference)
Either a true counting error, or a fraud meant to look like one.
United Kingdom - last election hundreds of people were denied right to vote at the polling booths (more people turned up than planned so they just told them to walk away), no action was taken.
Probably true lack of organization... Unless it can be shown that only precincts "leaning" a certain way were affected (as happened in Florida when Bush was first "elected").
United States - several elections with blatant fraud: 'numerous statistical analysis showed discrepancy in the number of votes Bush received"', no action was taken (in fact Bush was allowed to rule unquestioned twice).
Statistical analysis, but no "hard and fast" fact.
As shown by above examples, in Western countries, if there is fraud, the fraudsters usually builds up a more or less elaborate scheme that should:
The Indian "poll booth hijacking" is so egregious by its open-ness because it leaves the fraudster no way to weasel himself out of the accusations, should he get caught. To me, this means that the democratic culture there is so low (sorry to say so) that nobody cares about fraud, even if it is perpetrated in the open.
What stops people from selling their vote and going to the polling booth to vote?
Easy: the buyer has no way of verifying that the seller did indeed vote how he promised to vote.
it makes it *very* easy for people to disrupt, influence or plainly destroy votes there. Someone in this thread already pointed out practices like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing [wikipedia.org].
Such practices are ...hmmm... rather obvious. Meaning, that in a really democratic country, they would lead to instant cancellation of the election, and punishment of the perps.
If such brute force disruptions are commonplace in India, then security of electronic elections is indeed the least of their worries. Without punishment of obvious abuse, the crooks could just wheel a supercomputer into the polling station, collect all the electronic ballot pads, openly break their seals, and reflash whatever firmware they want into them, hand them back (or just hand their own devices back which don't even need to look like the original ones...), and move on to the next polling station. No need to worry about stealth and miniaturized flash Ram writers if nobody cares about open tampering.
Security (... any kind of security ...) only makes sense if there is a meaningful followup to obvious tampering. And how much more obvious than Booth capturing can you get? You're basically taking a whole polling station hostage, and there is no consequence to this? *Mind boggles*
Before talking about how insecure the web is ...
The problems with "voting at home" (or "at work") do have nothing to do with the lack of security of the web, but more with the lack of guaranteed privacy.
If you allow voting from work, who guarantees that the manager is not standing behind his employees, making sure that they vote the "right way". Or, at home, that the spouse isn't making similar enforcement. Or at the pub, that a buddy isn't promising a beer in exchange for the "good" vote...
As long as you allow voting away from designated polling stations, you can exclude neither voting under duress nor vote selling.
Usually, it's being trotten out by poor security professionals to justify not bothering because "as no system can be secure, why bother attempting to secure one?"
And, moreover, if your cell phone happens to be an iPhone, to you really want to show it off to a subway-car full of mean-looking strangers...
While you still might need to trim down on the number of keys you carry, at least this will protect your pockets, and any mobile that may be sharing a pocket with your keys.
And some of these pouches even have an additional smaller compartment that is handy for items such as USB keys.
Is it really that much effort to just fucking walk around the fucking house?
Lately I've noticed that the USPS vehicles in my area don't even have license plates...
Neither do they here.
kind of like the long-haul truckers expected to spend ridiculous times driving and yet still do all the corporate BS so they do it while driving.
If only they were only doing the corporate BS while driving...
And for any thing dependant on time, or on a long series of actions, screenshots don't make sense anyways.
Without resorting to rules written by the user, are there any e-mail clients that give the user a very solid notification that some e-mail address that doesn't end up at them is not in the "To:" or "Cc:" fields?
Not so easy, as any mail sent to a (mailman or majordomo) mailing list would look the same (user neither in To:, nor in Cc:), and we wouldn't want to put up a noisy warning just for replying to a mailing list message...
Or maybe lists could be identified in a different way? Sometimes Thunderbird shows a "reply to list" button, so how does it find out?
In that case, the rule would be "if user neither in To: nor in Cc:, and if it is not a list either, loudly warn when attempting to reply"
Do you realize that almost half of the questions on this Yes/No questionnaire are not Yes/No questions? (Yes/No)
wooooosh!
If you don't know what you're doing, you can cause a lot of harm. If you send out a message to a ton of clients and use CC instead of BCC....
And another favorite: Idiot doing a reply-all to a Mail that was Bcc'ed to him... (with the result that now all the others in Cc: and To: know about him being Bcc'ed...)
I know that there are some things that I would like on the test. It drives me nuts how many people don't know how to send screenshots around.
Indeed, the answer can be summed in 3 words: "not at all".
When you get a piece of text on a web page you want me to know about, just send me the text. I don't want a screenshot of the text.
And some idiots even manage to send a screenshot of a partially obscured error message. How useful is that? Had they just copy-pasted the text, it would have been complete.
But part of the "screenshot" problem is that so many helpdesks actually ask for them, even where it doesn't make any sense at all (such as "your website is very slow", answer: "could you send me a screenshot?")
And then let the sexual harassments lawsuits rain in on these backwards businesses that force their stuff to surf with such an explicit browser.
Should be phun to watch.
Why do you hate gay baboons?
Aren't all baboons gay?
O, sorry, I confused them with bonobos.
However, you're more than welcome to bring a gay dog :-)
We suck as a country and having a mafia supported/supporting government kind of kills any hope for a good reform...
Same thing as the US. Which has a mafiaa supported/supporting president, which kind of kills any hope for a good reform.
Yes, let's do this! I'm sure the Dutch can repurpose their caravans as houseboats.
Too little too late sir, I say we nuke Belgium to a depth of fifteen meters and fill that in instead.
The article is about dykes, and you are calling for the Enola Gay?
Monitors should be positioned such that someone walking by can't see what's on the screen...
hehe... I'm sure that developers prefer it that way, but their managers care more about productivity. An being able to sneak up on somebody certainly increases the amount of work done, and decreases the amount of "research".