I'm using yesterday's build and it still has the problem.
Hard to say that it's a mozilla problem, since Slashdot's HTML is not quite up to the standard. But perhaps mozilla/firefox needs a different failure mode so that this problem doesn't happen.
The article also mentions that the data is sent over a cellular telephone (changing the batter of which is apparently how the guy was found out).
So this must mean that the media thinks that cellular phones communicate with satellites. One wonders what they think of all those towers that have been going up for decades...
I am curious about the details of this UK system. Do you mind answering some questions?
How long after the polls close does this "checking of questionable ballots" happen?
What happens if a candidate or his/her representative decides to be stubborn and not agree with any of the decisions unless the consensus is for that candidate? It's entirely possible and very likely that these events are more civil in the UK. In the US, too many folks take the view of "I don't care what the right or proper thing to do is, I only care about what I can legally get away with."
I can just see some candidates in the counting hall making a big stink about everything and generally causing a stalemate with the counting process.
It's different because the computer operating the laser-printed ballot will not allow two names for the same office to be printed, or whatever way is used to indicate a vote for a candidate will not be allowed to happen twice for one position.
If the ballot does come out with "votes" for more than one candidate, the voter can see that and show the election officials to have the problem taken care of.
In this way, any question of election results is far less ambiguous. Those who say that e-voting's purpose is the quicker result are missing the point and appear to not understand that computers cannot be trusted because you cannot "see" they way they work. This is important to fair elections: voters must know that their vote is handled properly.
That's the way the US does it, too; in principle. One of the problems in Florida/2000 came about when voters made mistakes and either marked more than one candidate for a single post, thus invalidating the ballot, or were confused by the ballot layout and possibly voted for someone they did not intend to vote for. Matters were not helped when the media spread the "butterfly ballot" story and many who figured they might have made a mistake tried to contact election officials to either check or verify their vote, which of course cannot happen while maintaining voter anonymity, etc.
The election officials decided to nit-pick over what the cutoff was for declaring an invalid ballot by talking about the stupid chad business. And really, in the UK, what if someone puts a mark in next to their preferred candidate and then accidentally, and unknowingly drags the marker (pen, pencil?) over the ballot and makes a small mark over another candidate's area.
At what point does voter intent become unclear enough to invalidate a ballot?
The paper trail is not best implemented as a "Receipt" for voting, as that denies anonymity and allows coercion.
The right way for paper-backed electronic voting to take place is to have the electronic system present an easy-to-use interface, which can be adapted on-the-fly for various limitations in voters (deaf, blind, unable to grasp objects, etc.). Have that interface be the way to vote. Then print the ballot out on a strip of paper and give that paper to the voter. The voter then walks to the ballot box and places the ballot in, just like we do now.
This eliminates ambiguity in deciding whether a particular ballot is valid or invalid, since the ballot would have a clear indication of the voters' intents.
Sure you can also get a quick, accurate count from the aper-ballot-printing machines, but if you want to do a "Recount", then there aren't any ballots for corrupt or inept voting officials to declare as invalid.
Its official name is "Radio Direction Finding", but goes by several nicknames like "foxhunting", "transmitter hunting", or "t-hunting".
The "home base" of RDF information is the "Homing In" website at http://members.aol.com/homingin/
The author of that site has written a very good book explaining various techniques and containing plans for building various kinds of directional antennas.
Most T-Hunters are amateur radio operators (http://www.arrl.org), but that's not a requirement, since you aren't transmitting anything while hunting.
It's great fun. Use the ARRL website to search for any Amateur Radio clubs in your area and go to a meeting (usually boring, but some have good presentations) and ask about T-hunting in your area. If nobody knows, poke around and see if anyone there has done it in the past and is interested in starting it up again. Usually all it takes is knowledge that someone else is interested to get the whole group going.
Every time RFID comes up on Slashdot someone brings up that it can be read over a distance. Do not forget that there are many forms of RFID and that there are some that will not give up their information until they recieve the right unlocking key.
Not 100% secure, but the same type of authentication that CRAM-MD5 uses, which is trusted by many email servers and corporate remote authentication devices.
Don't assume that the type of RFID used will be chosen by techno-dolts who look only at price tag. There are knowledgeable folks out there doing the actual implementations.
Fusion's good, but isn't quite here yet. What is here already is Fission.
Fission is great. It does have a bad name, partly because of the relatively few nuclear accidents (which did affect large numbers of people in some cases, unfortunately) and partly because of the nasty "nuclear waste".
Why do we keep looking for places to store nuclear waste? We know how to process the nuclear waste to recover the massive amounts of unused fuel left in it, while making it less radioactive. We are not allowed to do this, however, because one intermediate state of this processing is "weapons-grade" plutonium, or some similar thing. Treaties that we have with states like Russia say that we won't produce this stuff anymore.
The end effect is that we (the public) believe that nulcear fission is an awful energy producer whose only lasting effect is the tons of "evil" nuclear waste that we want to store in Nevada, but which nobody wants near them (which is a reasonable, if not misdirected desire.)
"Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made. Spaceballs the T-shirt. Spaceballs the lunchbox. Spaceballs the coloring book. Spaceballs... the flame thrower! Kids love it."
To answer my own question, from the FCC's website:
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions.
So in a vague way they could have jurisdiction, but the upshot is that the decision is really in the bounds of copyright law and not communications. In this case, then, the FCC authorized such a player to be created and sold, but did not and cannot authorize such a device to be legal with regards to various other copyright related laws (DMCA, etc.).
Is this in the FCC's jurisdiction? They are in charge of regulating the airwaves of the United States. Once you've received a digital program over the air, does the FCC have any more authority to tell you what you can do with the copyrighted product that they don't even have the rights to distribute?
I think annual retests would be too frequent to be workable. Say an eyetest every year with written and road tests every 10 years (or 5 or 7, somewhere around that sort of regularity)
In the current situation, you're correct. Local motor vehicle departments would need vastly increased budgets to cover the additional load. As a practical matter, this is highly unlikely, and so what would end up happening is that the retests are so infrequent that they might as well not even happen. It's a sad state of affairs when the elected legistlators promise to increase the safety of those they represent, but refuse to either raise taxes or transfer funds from less worthy (in whose opinion... heh) projects in order to meet those promises.
I don't know about the U.K., but it seems like in the U.S., it's almost taboo to decrease anyone's budget. The rationale seems to be based mostly on the heart-string-tug of "we don't want to fire good ol' Bobby."
I like the points system. Many U.S. states have what amounts to the same thing: after so many offenses above a certain level (like driving while drunk, etc.) you can have your license revoked. I must say that for someone who did enough to have their license revoked, they would not be the kind to just stop driving because of it. I listen (legally, in my state) to the police radio frequencies in my city and hear too often of folks driving with their license suspended. The punishment for such an act is a fine of a couple hundred dollars. If you do it more than 3 or 4 times, you might get jail time, but more likely would get "community service" as the sentence.
One problem with getting stricter enforcement policies in place is that those who make such decisions (legistlators, city councilpersons, etc.) seem to expect that they are not exactly subject to the policies and laws that they help create by virtue of their "special and important" positions. The same goes for other influential people who, throught money or knowing the right people, can make the enforcers' lives very difficult. And so the influential people get off the hook. There seems to be too little oversight.
The U.S. Federal Government was set up with the 3 branches whose purposes are enforcement, interpretation, and creation of laws, separately. This structure is mirrored through the lower heirarchy all the way down to local city government. Unfortunately, citizens do not care enough to hold their local governments to the same level of oversight that occurs at the top levels. Local city judges rarely strike down a city ordinance created by the city council, even if it is fair. Why? I don't know.
Another problem which needs to be solved before automatic enforcement of traffic laws is implemented is the differing treatment of "outsiders". I don't know if it's a U.S. thing or a human trait, but we appear to look down upon those passing through the enforcement jurisdiction versus the "locals". If you don't believe that, try speeding through any small town in Texas and see how much chance you get to explain your purposes to the police or judge. It's endemic to all levels of government, though. We hold "our own" to a more leanient standard. The U.S. has wanted, since the creation of the war crimes courts, that U.S. soldiers be exempt from war crimes. Why? There is no purpose. If you help create laws, it does no good to either the benefit of the public body, nor to your own reputation if you exempt your own from such laws.
Long ago when I took my drivers' education course at the high-school, my other classmates didn't care about learning the rules. They thought they already knew enough, because they know how to press on the pedals...
It didn't help that one of the worst drivers in the class missed 7/15 of the multiple choice questions that it takes to get a license to drive in Texas, yet the grader working for the Department of Public Safety said, "Well, we will just pass you anyway."
I think that in the United States we need a very rigorous written AND on-street test and that drivers should be retested yearly.
I think that the laws in place ought to be enforced ALL THE TIME. If the speed limit is X, then you had better not drive over X MPH, even if you think it's a stupidly low limit. The solution to "bad laws" isn't to break them, but to get them changed (granted, this doesn't happen as quickly as just breaking the law.)
I think that routine traffic laws can be enforced by automatic device. I do not think that this violates anyone's privacy rights. I think that a person's right to privacy is severely diminished when a person is in a public place (like streets...) Privacy laws are intended to ensure that what you do in private stays there, not to make sure that you can break the law if you don't get caught. The law is the law and if you break it, why does it have to be in front of a police officer to have any weight?
I do note that I do not have a solution to the problem of ensuring that automatic enforcement is accurate and unabused. I am sure that it is possible, but I am also aware that some police districts in the U.S. are corrupt. That still does not give anyone permission to break the laws that are in place.
There was a contest: The contest organizers would collect a bounty from folks. If some group met the challenge (bash shell in Tivo) before the deadline, then they would get the collected money.
There is a group now that claims to have a working solution to the challenge, but they are saying they will not release it until the collected bounty is at least $1000 and with a promise that the contest organizers will not send it to the winners, but to the EFF instead.
Just last week I went to the Johnson Space Center and took the tour of the Apollo-era mission control and they said that the flags planted on the moon were plain silk flags bought at Sears.
The mounting was special, with wire to hold it in the "perpetual waving" shape, but they told us that the flag itself was just like you or I could buy at that time (were we alive then...)
Re:Going the way of the dinosaurs
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for doing the research. BTW: Your OpenTracker is running just great for me;-)
Re:Going the way of the dinosaurs
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I think it's been shown in an official comment or ruling by the FCC that encryption is not wholly illegal on ham radio. The wording of the rules states that amateurs aren't supposed to obscure the meaning of their communications.
The specific ruling that I am too lazy to look up;-) states that it's okay to use an encoding for authorization. So you could check your IMAP email over ham packet if you used the CRAM-MD5 method of authentication. You wouldn't currently be allowed to use SSL for the whole session, but CRAM-MD5 allows you to authenticate with a shared secret without exposing the secret over the air.
Re:Field Day in Ann Arbor, Michigan
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 1
For those interested: An Oscar station is one that communicates by relaying the signal (analog OR digital) through an Amateur Radio-carrying satellite orbiting the Earth.
Re:Pretty cool
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The question I would ask is: Connected to what?
Sure both Ham radio operators and wireless networking enthusiasts (note that those two groups aren't mutually exclusive!) could get connected to each other pretty darn quickly if a catastrophe were to occur.
WiFi operators are pretty much restricted to the low power transmitters and short wavelenth that the off-the-shelf equipment provides. Good antennas, amplifiers, and path design can make for links that extend dozens of kilometers, but the HF Ham rig in my truck can reach other Hams in the US and almost all other countries in the world with just a short whip antenna (1.5 meters and a coil).
It does draw more power and it's not digital. I could do digital data transfer on Ham HF bands, but not near as fast as WiFi. Both have infinite usefulness in emergencies and it's a shame that one is decreasing in use while the other is growing, rather than both growing. If both were growing, I think we would see more people interested in making the two fields interoperate better. The current group of Ham WiFi enthusiasts is small relative to the general "old codgers" of Ham radio.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using yesterday's build and it still has the problem.
Hard to say that it's a mozilla problem, since Slashdot's HTML is not quite up to the standard. But perhaps mozilla/firefox needs a different failure mode so that this problem doesn't happen.
The article also mentions that the data is sent over a cellular telephone (changing the batter of which is apparently how the guy was found out).
So this must mean that the media thinks that cellular phones communicate with satellites. One wonders what they think of all those towers that have been going up for decades...
The governments of the world's nations have always seemed to have some amount of control over ideas and technology such as this.
During World War II, many mathemeticians worked for the governments of the UK and USA to break and design cryptographic tools and methods.
It's only recently that some of them are being allowed to tell of what they have done.
One can only imagine what is being developed these days that we won't know about until many years later.
I am curious about the details of this UK system. Do you mind answering some questions?
:-(
How long after the polls close does this "checking of questionable ballots" happen?
What happens if a candidate or his/her representative decides to be stubborn and not agree with any of the decisions unless the consensus is for that candidate? It's entirely possible and very likely that these events are more civil in the UK. In the US, too many folks take the view of "I don't care what the right or proper thing to do is, I only care about what I can legally get away with."
I can just see some candidates in the counting hall making a big stink about everything and generally causing a stalemate with the counting process.
Yes, it is sad.
It's different because the computer operating the laser-printed ballot will not allow two names for the same office to be printed, or whatever way is used to indicate a vote for a candidate will not be allowed to happen twice for one position.
If the ballot does come out with "votes" for more than one candidate, the voter can see that and show the election officials to have the problem taken care of.
In this way, any question of election results is far less ambiguous. Those who say that e-voting's purpose is the quicker result are missing the point and appear to not understand that computers cannot be trusted because you cannot "see" they way they work. This is important to fair elections: voters must know that their vote is handled properly.
It was that slight difference between "hands in receipt" and "receipt in hand" :-)
That's the way the US does it, too; in principle. One of the problems in Florida/2000 came about when voters made mistakes and either marked more than one candidate for a single post, thus invalidating the ballot, or were confused by the ballot layout and possibly voted for someone they did not intend to vote for. Matters were not helped when the media spread the "butterfly ballot" story and many who figured they might have made a mistake tried to contact election officials to either check or verify their vote, which of course cannot happen while maintaining voter anonymity, etc.
The election officials decided to nit-pick over what the cutoff was for declaring an invalid ballot by talking about the stupid chad business. And really, in the UK, what if someone puts a mark in next to their preferred candidate and then accidentally, and unknowingly drags the marker (pen, pencil?) over the ballot and makes a small mark over another candidate's area.
At what point does voter intent become unclear enough to invalidate a ballot?
Oops, I misread your post. We agree :-)
The paper trail is not best implemented as a "Receipt" for voting, as that denies anonymity and allows coercion.
The right way for paper-backed electronic voting to take place is to have the electronic system present an easy-to-use interface, which can be adapted on-the-fly for various limitations in voters (deaf, blind, unable to grasp objects, etc.). Have that interface be the way to vote. Then print the ballot out on a strip of paper and give that paper to the voter. The voter then walks to the ballot box and places the ballot in, just like we do now.
This eliminates ambiguity in deciding whether a particular ballot is valid or invalid, since the ballot would have a clear indication of the voters' intents.
Sure you can also get a quick, accurate count from the aper-ballot-printing machines, but if you want to do a "Recount", then there aren't any ballots for corrupt or inept voting officials to declare as invalid.
Its official name is "Radio Direction Finding", but goes by several nicknames like "foxhunting", "transmitter hunting", or "t-hunting".
The "home base" of RDF information is the "Homing In" website at http://members.aol.com/homingin/
The author of that site has written a very good book explaining various techniques and containing plans for building various kinds of directional antennas.
Most T-Hunters are amateur radio operators (http://www.arrl.org), but that's not a requirement, since you aren't transmitting anything while hunting.
It's great fun. Use the ARRL website to search for any Amateur Radio clubs in your area and go to a meeting (usually boring, but some have good presentations) and ask about T-hunting in your area. If nobody knows, poke around and see if anyone there has done it in the past and is interested in starting it up again. Usually all it takes is knowledge that someone else is interested to get the whole group going.
Every time RFID comes up on Slashdot someone brings up that it can be read over a distance. Do not forget that there are many forms of RFID and that there are some that will not give up their information until they recieve the right unlocking key.
Not 100% secure, but the same type of authentication that CRAM-MD5 uses, which is trusted by many email servers and corporate remote authentication devices.
Don't assume that the type of RFID used will be chosen by techno-dolts who look only at price tag. There are knowledgeable folks out there doing the actual implementations.
Fusion's good, but isn't quite here yet. What is here already is Fission.
Fission is great. It does have a bad name, partly because of the relatively few nuclear accidents (which did affect large numbers of people in some cases, unfortunately) and partly because of the nasty "nuclear waste".
Why do we keep looking for places to store nuclear waste? We know how to process the nuclear waste to recover the massive amounts of unused fuel left in it, while making it less radioactive. We are not allowed to do this, however, because one intermediate state of this processing is "weapons-grade" plutonium, or some similar thing. Treaties that we have with states like Russia say that we won't produce this stuff anymore.
The end effect is that we (the public) believe that nulcear fission is an awful energy producer whose only lasting effect is the tons of "evil" nuclear waste that we want to store in Nevada, but which nobody wants near them (which is a reasonable, if not misdirected desire.)
"Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made. Spaceballs the T-shirt. Spaceballs the lunchbox. Spaceballs the coloring book. Spaceballs... the flame thrower! Kids love it."
'cuz we all know that France is the expert at getting Virgins to open up... ;-)
-offtopic
The FCC also regulates receivers because receivers can and do emit RF energy (by virtue of the tunable receiver design).
However, they have typically cared only about the emissions levels and frequencies of receivers and not the actual functions.
Is this in the FCC's jurisdiction? They are in charge of regulating the airwaves of the United States. Once you've received a digital program over the air, does the FCC have any more authority to tell you what you can do with the copyrighted product that they don't even have the rights to distribute?
I'm just asking...
In the current situation, you're correct. Local motor vehicle departments would need vastly increased budgets to cover the additional load. As a practical matter, this is highly unlikely, and so what would end up happening is that the retests are so infrequent that they might as well not even happen. It's a sad state of affairs when the elected legistlators promise to increase the safety of those they represent, but refuse to either raise taxes or transfer funds from less worthy (in whose opinion... heh) projects in order to meet those promises.
I don't know about the U.K., but it seems like in the U.S., it's almost taboo to decrease anyone's budget. The rationale seems to be based mostly on the heart-string-tug of "we don't want to fire good ol' Bobby."
I like the points system. Many U.S. states have what amounts to the same thing: after so many offenses above a certain level (like driving while drunk, etc.) you can have your license revoked. I must say that for someone who did enough to have their license revoked, they would not be the kind to just stop driving because of it. I listen (legally, in my state) to the police radio frequencies in my city and hear too often of folks driving with their license suspended. The punishment for such an act is a fine of a couple hundred dollars. If you do it more than 3 or 4 times, you might get jail time, but more likely would get "community service" as the sentence.
One problem with getting stricter enforcement policies in place is that those who make such decisions (legistlators, city councilpersons, etc.) seem to expect that they are not exactly subject to the policies and laws that they help create by virtue of their "special and important" positions. The same goes for other influential people who, throught money or knowing the right people, can make the enforcers' lives very difficult. And so the influential people get off the hook. There seems to be too little oversight.
The U.S. Federal Government was set up with the 3 branches whose purposes are enforcement, interpretation, and creation of laws, separately. This structure is mirrored through the lower heirarchy all the way down to local city government. Unfortunately, citizens do not care enough to hold their local governments to the same level of oversight that occurs at the top levels. Local city judges rarely strike down a city ordinance created by the city council, even if it is fair. Why? I don't know.
Another problem which needs to be solved before automatic enforcement of traffic laws is implemented is the differing treatment of "outsiders". I don't know if it's a U.S. thing or a human trait, but we appear to look down upon those passing through the enforcement jurisdiction versus the "locals". If you don't believe that, try speeding through any small town in Texas and see how much chance you get to explain your purposes to the police or judge. It's endemic to all levels of government, though. We hold "our own" to a more leanient standard. The U.S. has wanted, since the creation of the war crimes courts, that U.S. soldiers be exempt from war crimes. Why? There is no purpose. If you help create laws, it does no good to either the benefit of the public body, nor to your own reputation if you exempt your own from such laws.
Yes! Amen to this!
Long ago when I took my drivers' education course at the high-school, my other classmates didn't care about learning the rules. They thought they already knew enough, because they know how to press on the pedals...
It didn't help that one of the worst drivers in the class missed 7/15 of the multiple choice questions that it takes to get a license to drive in Texas, yet the grader working for the Department of Public Safety said, "Well, we will just pass you anyway."
I think that in the United States we need a very rigorous written AND on-street test and that drivers should be retested yearly.
I think that the laws in place ought to be enforced ALL THE TIME. If the speed limit is X, then you had better not drive over X MPH, even if you think it's a stupidly low limit. The solution to "bad laws" isn't to break them, but to get them changed (granted, this doesn't happen as quickly as just breaking the law.)
I think that routine traffic laws can be enforced by automatic device. I do not think that this violates anyone's privacy rights. I think that a person's right to privacy is severely diminished when a person is in a public place (like streets...) Privacy laws are intended to ensure that what you do in private stays there, not to make sure that you can break the law if you don't get caught. The law is the law and if you break it, why does it have to be in front of a police officer to have any weight?
I do note that I do not have a solution to the problem of ensuring that automatic enforcement is accurate and unabused. I am sure that it is possible, but I am also aware that some police districts in the U.S. are corrupt. That still does not give anyone permission to break the laws that are in place.
There was a contest: The contest organizers would collect a bounty from folks. If some group met the challenge (bash shell in Tivo) before the deadline, then they would get the collected money.
There is a group now that claims to have a working solution to the challenge, but they are saying they will not release it until the collected bounty is at least $1000 and with a promise that the contest organizers will not send it to the winners, but to the EFF instead.
Just last week I went to the Johnson Space Center and took the tour of the Apollo-era mission control and they said that the flags planted on the moon were plain silk flags bought at Sears.
The mounting was special, with wire to hold it in the "perpetual waving" shape, but they told us that the flag itself was just like you or I could buy at that time (were we alive then...)
Thanks for doing the research. BTW: Your OpenTracker is running just great for me ;-)
I think it's been shown in an official comment or ruling by the FCC that encryption is not wholly illegal on ham radio. The wording of the rules states that amateurs aren't supposed to obscure the meaning of their communications.
;-) states that it's okay to use an encoding for authorization. So you could check your IMAP email over ham packet if you used the CRAM-MD5 method of authentication. You wouldn't currently be allowed to use SSL for the whole session, but CRAM-MD5 allows you to authenticate with a shared secret without exposing the secret over the air.
The specific ruling that I am too lazy to look up
For those interested: An Oscar station is one that communicates by relaying the signal (analog OR digital) through an Amateur Radio-carrying satellite orbiting the Earth.
The question I would ask is: Connected to what?
Sure both Ham radio operators and wireless networking enthusiasts (note that those two groups aren't mutually exclusive!) could get connected to each other pretty darn quickly if a catastrophe were to occur.
WiFi operators are pretty much restricted to the low power transmitters and short wavelenth that the off-the-shelf equipment provides. Good antennas, amplifiers, and path design can make for links that extend dozens of kilometers, but the HF Ham rig in my truck can reach other Hams in the US and almost all other countries in the world with just a short whip antenna (1.5 meters and a coil).
It does draw more power and it's not digital. I could do digital data transfer on Ham HF bands, but not near as fast as WiFi. Both have infinite usefulness in emergencies and it's a shame that one is decreasing in use while the other is growing, rather than both growing. If both were growing, I think we would see more people interested in making the two fields interoperate better. The current group of Ham WiFi enthusiasts is small relative to the general "old codgers" of Ham radio.