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The People's Code

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191–200 of 203 posts

Re: The People's Code

#193
Just an honest question. Can I obtain some estimation of the capabilities of CS people working for the government by just reading all these code. Will I find here a glimpse of code beautifully designed and tailored to solve some really deep problem that require real intelligence?, can I use these code to learn how to code a big project?

Re: The People's Code

#194
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The gov TLD is US only. And you think it is normal? Why not gov.us? The US are always giving lessons to the world, but do not even understand that we --the other parts of the world-- would like to have some minimal level of fairness.

> Why not gov.us? Because creator privilege and because life is not fair.

Civilisation, development of human ethics, laws, all this stuff is our way to adjust for the unfairness of life. Also, back people did not invent our create the buses, was it right to let them seat in the back, when they where even allow to get in?

Re: The People's Code

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, I don't discourage it. I just think that you can't be satisfy with it. Open source voting machine are still an abomination for the democratic process.

remind me again how the open-source part makes anything worse than a standard voting machine?

It does not. Read the entire thread before being offended.

Re: The People's Code

#196
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like the US government makes widescale use of Google analytics, so it's hardly inappropriate: https://analytics.usa.gov/

Pointing out more instances of a problem doesn't make the problem "hardly inappropriate"; it indicates the problem is more widespread.

Analytics makes websites better, and Piwik is not easy or cheap to use at scale. Sharing web traffic data with Google Analytics (especially with IPs anonymized) is a pretty small issue IMO, especially when the benefits are you get good data like what's on analytics.usa.gov.

(Disclosure: I work on analytics.usa.gov.)

Re: The People's Code

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, with monopsony it's rather simple: "If you don't publish the code, then we will have to use paper ballots."

No effort towards innovation would then go into that sector. Ever again.

>No effort towards innovation would then go into that sector. Ever again.

Good. You're talking about something that needs to handle a small handful of registers perfectly and produce a paper audit trail. Innovation is not only not needed, it should be actively suppressed due to the risk to the security of the electoral process.

Re: The People's Code

#198
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not exactly the same as choosing to use something that is hosted on someone else's server, which they could then subsequently modify now that you are using it in a very high-profile project. Of course, judging candidates' by the code quality of their campaign websites is a rather obscure and somewhat useless pastime.

I agree that it's still bad practice. My main objection was to the statement "Since GitHub is for open-source projects, it also meant that any user could submit a request to modify the code and impact Trump’s website". If don't trust the maintainers' judgement in merging PRs, hosting it yourself isn't a solution (short of reviewing the entire project yourself).

I think the concern here is that the maintainer could subsequently merge a malicious PR knowing who was using the library from GitHub. That wouldn't be an issue if that group was hosting a version themselves (before the maintainer might find out who was using it).

Re: The People's Code

#199
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointing out more instances of a problem doesn't make the problem "hardly inappropriate"; it indicates the problem is more widespread.

Analytics makes websites better, and Piwik is not easy or cheap to use at scale. Sharing web traffic data with Google Analytics (especially with IPs anonymized) is a pretty small issue IMO, especially when the benefits are you get good data like what's on analytics.usa.gov. (Disclosure: I work on analytics.usa.gov.)

> (especially with IPs anonymized)

While I'm sure you have good intentions in trying to anonymize the collected data, you should know that the claims made by Google at [1] are highly misleading. Their claim is that they strip the last octet of the IP address, but that isn't nearly enough cooking to call the data "anonymous".

Assuming Google actually does this and isn't simply lying about saving the full IP (which has to be sent to them, as it is obviously in the SRC field of the IP header), this means they are only binning IPs into groups of 256. They only need at most 8 bits of identifying data other than the IP to uniquely correlate individuals within each IP group.

More than 8 bits of unique ID are available, given that various types of data that being tracked[2] about the user agent and (presumably) IP geolocation.

Also, Google is keeping enough of the IP to lookup the ASN.

> I work on analytics.usa.gov.

So if you're actually interested in claiming that "The program does not track individuals, and anonymizes the IP addresses of visitors"[2], then you really shouldn't be using an analytics service that - in spite of their claims of anonymizing" some data - obvious is tracking individuals and saving the most interesting parts of their IP address.

> Sharing web traffic data with Google Analytics [...] is a pretty small issue IMO,

Building profiles of everything we read or do online is probably the largest problem we will have going forward into the future. Data doesn't go away, and the problem compounds when the data can be correlated with other types of data. If you think this isn't a problem, then you really need to study what is possible with pattern-of-life analysis[4].

[1] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en

[2] https://analytics.usa.gov/data/

[3] https://analytics.usa.gov/#explanation

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern-of-life_analysis

Re: The People's Code

#200

How about open source code for some makes and models of voting machine? The US Veterans' Administration health records software system is in the public domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA#Licensing_and_disseminat... But it's not listed here. (It's also kind of complex. "wget; tar x; ./configure ; make" probably won't get you a running instance. Still.

I've been thinking about this in the past few days, and decided to make a petition about it.

https://wh.gov/iervT

tl;dr lets develop public-domain voting systems so we can audit them.

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