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How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

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Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#371

Post by jarofgreen »

samuel wrote: post #360
jarofgreen wrote: post #212

"In the where to vote? page, you are prompted to enter some of your details: DNI (national id), Birth date, Zip code" Wait a second, can someone from the area explain this? Why on earth do they need your ID number just to tell you where to vote? In my country (UK) 99% of the time all you need is a postcode and you can be told your voting place. (I say 99% because there are a few postcodes that are split across differ…

You are told your voting place and the specific table inside that place.

> and the specific table inside that place.

Ohhhhhhh, is that the information I'm missing? So you have to know both the building you vote in and the specific table you need to go to?

In the UK, you just turn up at the the right building and there are signs to guide you from there. You don't need to know in advance what table to vote from. (Unless it's changed recently - I've had a postal vote the last 2 elections. Can anyone from the UK confirm?)

That would make the question "Where do I vote?" much harder to answer. In the UK, for 99% of the population it's a simple "My postcode -> building address" lookup table that contains no voter personal information at all. But if Catalan has to have "??? -> building address and which table" that is much harder.

Thank you, that sounds like the answer I was missing then.

But Q: If you only knew the building you had to vote from, and not which table, could you still turn up at the building and be able to vote somehow? Or would they really turn you away?

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#372

Post by trapperkeeper74 »

red_admiral wrote: post #28
kilburn wrote: post #2

Author here. I've tried to keep the article as apolitical as possible, while giving some context to provide the setting. Anyway, I'm very interested in knowing if the used crypto is sound or not, and stirring a discussion around possible alternative approaches. Ask me anything if you want to know further!

The crypto is far from ideal. The situation is very similar to password storage, where you want to not make it trivial to brute-force moderate-entropy passwords even if your database gets breached. We have functions designed specifically for that: scrypt, argon2 etc. https://www.npmjs.com/package/scryptsy is a pure JS implementation of scrypt for example. Even with scrypt the situation is not great, but using sha for…

Scrypt is tweakable for RAM and runtime constraints. From that PBKDF, it would make sense to use something like HMAC-SHA2 with another magic nonce, and then private information plus previous PBKDF output hash together as the authenticated part. If you want to get really tricky, add another random secret hash.

And, they probably should’ve used HMAC-SHA2 to derive the public primary index key insead of a hash function directly.

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#373

Post by jknz »

farresito wrote: post #336
wildmusings wrote: post #324

It doesn't matter that they can circumvent it. The fact that the Spanish government has taken such drastic actions means that the result of the vote will be completely meaningless and illegitimate. Opponents of the referendum who agree with the Spanish government will not participate.

The reason referendums don't have a minimum of votes is precisely to avoid boicots like the one that the opposition is trying to do, so if they don't want to vote it's up to them, but that doesn't make the referendum any less valid.

If the referendum unlawful, then some people will not go to vote, simply because they usually avoid breaking the law.

The result would be valid (from a probabilistic point of view) if "going to vote" was independent of "voting yes". But if the there is any correlation between "going to vote" and "voting yes" then the result of the referendum will be significantly different than the result of a referendum where any individual was forced to vote.

Here there might be a correlation: people in favor or independence or more likely to go voting than others.

A similar phenomenon may have happened in the us. If there is a correlation between "lying to polls" and "voting for candidate A" then the poll predictions can become very wrong.

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#374

Post by jarofgreen »

kilburn wrote: post #225
jarofgreen wrote: post #212

"In the where to vote? page, you are prompted to enter some of your details: DNI (national id), Birth date, Zip code" Wait a second, can someone from the area explain this? Why on earth do they need your ID number just to tell you where to vote? In my country (UK) 99% of the time all you need is a postcode and you can be told your voting place. (I say 99% because there are a few postcodes that are split across differ…

For most people that would suffice, but there are exceptions: people who moved recently, people who is not accounted for, etc.. This way, if you are not in the database you know that there's a problem and can ask the authorities to get it fixed before it is too late and you cannot vote.

That's a different question tho - what your talking about is "Am I registered to vote correctly?" and there is no way to answer that without a DB of personal information in some way.

(This could be handled better in the UK - at the recent election there was a website for last minute registrations which got lots of traffic, and afterwards they said a very large amount of people were already registered. But there is no easy system to check if you are already registered .... so everyone just used this site to sign up again.)

BUT

The article talks about answering the question "Where do I vote?". The assumption is the registration is correct, you just want to know where to vote.

In my country, this can be answered by a information system that contains no personal information at all, so I was surprised to see the DOB & ID bit in the original post.

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#375

Post by jarofgreen »

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #292
jarofgreen wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair point but doesn't explain why ID & DOB are needed. I asked about this in another comment - in my country, you just need your postcode to find your polling place 99% of the time.

It's needed because it depend on the census. In Spain you don't have to register to vote every time. Just show up at the place you have to, based on the census.

Interesting, but that doesn't answer my question. It's not in any way about voter registration.

I'm asking why can't you be told where to vote - the original thing the article is about - based on your postcode only. But I think I have my answer in another thread.

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#376

Post by dragonwriter »

joe_the_user wrote: post #237
justin66 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The NORMAL reaction by the state is to apply it, and stop the Catalan government from breaking it. It's interesting that you think so. I'd say the normal thing to do would be to issue a press release pointing out that the results aren't legally binding under the constitution and whoever wastes government money running a referendum on the thing might be held criminally or civilly liable. Actually trying to STOP the…

This is incorrect. If, for example, the State Of California, in the US, were to organize, without constitutional mandate, an "official" referendum calling for succession, Federal Marshall would be all over that in a blink of an eye. And I'd agree that heavy-handed action gives the Calatan separatists quite a boost ... for the short term. But states don't really have choice about enforcing the law when a significant a…

> If, for example, the State Of California, in the US, were to organize, without constitutional mandate, an "official" referendum calling for succession, Federal Marshall would be all over that in a blink of an eye.

California has, in fact, held initiatives (“referendum” has a particular meaning in California law which is slightly different than it's general usage) on things which violate the federal Constitution. The federal government has done nothing about the votes, though it has a role in challenging and overturning substantive actions taken by the State based on such initiatives after they've passed.

There's no real reason to think a secession initiative would be any different.

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#377

Post by gpvos »

mabbo wrote: post #61

I just left Barcelona a couple hours ago, the capital of Catalonia. Everywhere you look, Catalan flags, signs demanding 'democracia', demanding freedom. I'm told this is just normal for the region, but if this is normal then independence is eventual.

Actually, only slightly less than 50% wants independence. They are very vocal though. Also, since education in Catalonia is entirely in Catalonian (also they have their own history books), and use of Spanish in public is heavily discouraged, children will grow up in a mostly Catalonian environment, which makes it likely that that percentage will grow over time.

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#378

Post by gpvos »

pepon wrote: post #254
elecbit wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that "not voting is also democracy". However I cannot agree about not allowing to vote, which is the case. It's a political issue, which should be solved like it was in Scotland. In the name of what, a group can decide over another on what is it allowed to do? Because of the frontiers made after conquering when using force?

"In the name of what, a group can decide over another on what is it allowed to do?" Of course that a group can decide over another group which is a subset of the former. Otherwise, any city of any country, or any group of individuals, could decide to vote and set their own rules for whatever they want.

Pure rule of the majority is a perversion of democracy (this holds both on the Spanish and the Catalonian level). Taking minorities into account and giving them appropriate rights is just as integral a part of democracy.

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#379

Post by jarofgreen »

jarofgreen wrote: post #212

"In the where to vote? page, you are prompted to enter some of your details: DNI (national id), Birth date, Zip code" Wait a second, can someone from the area explain this? Why on earth do they need your ID number just to tell you where to vote? In my country (UK) 99% of the time all you need is a postcode and you can be told your voting place. (I say 99% because there are a few postcodes that are split across differ…

Replying to my own Q to explain why I'm going on about this.

It seems to me the OP set out to answer the question "Where do I vote?".

And they did this by releasing a whole bunch of personal information on every citizen online. That, no matter how good the encryption or how slight the P.I. is, strikes me as a bad idea.

Who's to say that in 6 months a flaw isn't revealed in the encryption method that leaves it all open? Or in a year there isn't a breakthrought in brute forcing and suddenly it's easy to open? And while you could argue the P.I. is slight (DOB, ZIP and ID only) maybe it's actually very powerful to bad people when combined with other data sets?

Basically, if there was any way to create a data set to answer the question "Where do I vote?" without including any Personal Information (like you can in the UK) that is so much better, because then you have an open data set you can pass around freely in as many ways as possible with no fancy crypto needed and no worries about personal information leaking. You could even print the damn thing and put it up in the town square, no fancy tech needed.

ps. Some people are talking about the question of "Am I registered to vote correctly?". That does require Personal Information in a DB, no way around that. But that's not what the original article was about. That very clearly says "Where to vote? ... how is the catalan government supposed to notify people their assigned polling stations?". Being clear about the question really does help sometimes. :-)

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#380

Post by gpvos »

SapphireSun wrote: post #123
amelius wrote: post #112

As an outsider, it's strange that nobody here seems to question whether the referendum really makes sense. Forgetting about Catalonia for a moment, isn't it fundamentally amoral that a part of the country where prosperity has (by mere chance) concentrated suddenly wants to split off? Isn't this taking wealth-inequality to the next level? Of course the people in a prosperous part of the country want to split off. Abso…

The part that makes it even more confusing for me is that their party, Podemos, is a real left party which you'd expect to be against increasing income inequality. I expect that the situation in Spain is much more complex than we give it credit for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podemos_(Spanish_political_par... EDIT: added link, changed "socialist" to "left"

Downvoted because "their" is a very misleading word. Podemos is not particularly Catalan.
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