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UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

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Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#151

Post by haltingproblem »

kortex wrote: post #105
haltingproblem wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped reading around: "Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;" and something about (only) Ireland repealed it in [1]. In [2] it says, quite straight faced, that "The Constitution of the United Kingdom or British constitution comprises the written and unwritten arrangements that establish the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a politica…

“If you think for a minute, is it not the case that every dictator in the world has a bill of rights, every banana republic, every republic has a bill of rights?” - Antonin Scalia A constitution without the ecosystem and institutions to carry it out is meaningless paper. Institutions without a constitution, but with a long history of case law can be just. Governments are systems but people aren't computers and laws a…

This is a good train of thought even though you quoted Scalia who was a strict constructionist.

Care to expand on it?

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#152

Post by killingtime74 »

strbean wrote: post #128
KarlKemp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the fact that she had to resign point to the opposite conclusion, namely that these governments are distinct entities with sometimes conflicting interests?

She is now Home Secretary of the UK. She got fired upwards.

I too hope I will be fired some day (upwards)

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#153

Post by recuter »

coliveira wrote: post #93
qiskit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel too Are you really surprised? I'd be surprised if the UK and its media made a fuss about it. Certainly we won't be making a fuss about it here in the US that's for sure. I'd imagine russia and china wishes they had 1/10th the influence that israel has in the US/UK. Say what you want about israel, but for such a tiny country, it punches f…

I don't know about Russia, but China doesn't let people from other nationalities to occupy positions of power especially in foreign policy, in which they're completely right. This is the main weakness of the USA and UK. They will let foreign born people to raise to power and dictate self servicing policies, many times in detriment to their own population. For example, take Henry Kissinger: a german born person, he sp…

Just wait until you find out the UK had a Jewish prime minister.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli

The rabbit hole goes deeper, keep digging! They can't keep the truth hidden forever.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#154

Post by beprogrammed »

Spellman wrote: post #79
yaa_minu wrote: post #23

This is a bit of a tangent but I think reports like these strengthen the argument against electronic voting. There's basically no way of building a secure electronic voting system that can beat the security and auditability properties of old school pen and paper voting.

Generally a lot of voting security experts advocate for paper ballots with electronic counting. It is very robust, efficient, has great fallback, and lots of systems available to keep secure.

I envision a system where after I vote I rip off the top of the card and am able to use that hash like token to later verify that my vote was counted correctly

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#155

Post by 1over137 »

mrtksn wrote: post #7

I'm curious about the threat modelling of those high level officials. With all these hacking going on, if feels like it's not been a consideration. Pegasus claims iOS and Android hacking capabilities, one would expect more specialised communications being used at that level. Car companies provide specialised vehicles for governmental use, I would have expected to see specialised iOS or Android devices at least. Nothi…

>with special software configurations and features to detect and prevent attacks

I could imagine a special build of the OS where everything was compiled with Address Sanitizer. You'd take a bit on performance and battery, but, tradeoffs.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#156

Post by orangepanda »

beprogrammed wrote: post #154
Spellman wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally a lot of voting security experts advocate for paper ballots with electronic counting. It is very robust, efficient, has great fallback, and lots of systems available to keep secure.

I envision a system where after I vote I rip off the top of the card and am able to use that hash like token to later verify that my vote was counted correctly

I envision the same system to later verify the votes I bought

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#157

Post by dataflow »

haltingproblem wrote: post #147
dataflow wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note majority rule isn't in the definition either, it's just strongly correlated. As the simplest example, a democracy that required 55% of the votes wouldn't stop being a democracy. For more different examples, see the lottery system I linked to, or imagine variations thereof (e.g., half the population votes one year, half the next year, etc.). Also, I don't think the age-limit is a red herring in this case to be ho…

> "As the simplest example, a democracy that required 55% of the votes wouldn't stop being a democracy." Good point. Considering that 55% is > 50%, would we not say that anything that requires more than 50%, is a supra-majority system? In a multi-party system, they sometimes require some thresholds which requires runoffs but I would consider them supra-majority or supra-variations on the majority rule. > Claiming a 1…

I just wrote a long reply to your comment, but I realized it ultimately was just a ramble, so I'll scrap it.

To answer your questions briefly:

- Sure, I guess we can call it that.

- Term limits seem orthogonal to the lottery system though? You can have either with or without the other. Not sure I can see them as being versions of each other.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#158

Post by russnes »

mrtksn wrote: post #7

I'm curious about the threat modelling of those high level officials. With all these hacking going on, if feels like it's not been a consideration. Pegasus claims iOS and Android hacking capabilities, one would expect more specialised communications being used at that level. Car companies provide specialised vehicles for governmental use, I would have expected to see specialised iOS or Android devices at least. Nothi…

I would guess the best approach is to try to have as small an attack surface as possible, meaning as few applications etc, and the simplest possible operating system.

Like for example a minimalist build of the PinePhone with software that literally never updates unless there is a security issue. Maybe something like a stripped down Slackware, or I was gonna say OpenBSD where even the proprietary hardware drivers are re-written to be open source (and free), but I guess for the PinePhone, the hardware is already open anyways.

edit: A stripped down Slackware I should say

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#159

Post by somenameforme »

Lukineus wrote: post #115
rdedev wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does having a paper trail generated exactly after voting help? This is the system that's followed in India. I tried to think of ways it could fail but it seemed pretty fool proof as far as I can think. I'm pretty sure I might have missed some corner case

If you're going to have a paper trail for an electronic system, then why not just use the paper system? It's like there's a pro-electronic movement that's looking for every excuse to move to electronic... Ok, so we go electronic. We put in all these extra checks and balances to account for it's downsides. It runs well. People start questioning the need for the checks and balances, since it's so full-proof. So we remo…

> "For the people that complain about the staffing requirements for a paper-based election: it's a feature, not a bug. The sheer number of people involved make it virtually impossible to rig an election."

There are two ways to rig an election. The first is miscounting or changing votes but I think the other is the real risk and likely dates to the very first time we as a species ever started having votes by anonymous ballot: ballot stuffing. If, at any time in counting process, an individual could successfully insert a single valid but fabricated ballot into the process, the entire system is vulnerable.

And the number of votes required to change elections tends to be shockingly low. In the 2020 election, more than 155 million people voted, but the outcome of the presidential election itself was decided by a total of less than 43,000 votes [1]. That's a margin of victory of 0.03%. So a system that was 99.9% accurate at ensuring that each ballot was completely legitimate would be insufficient.

[1] - https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/10/wapo-the-...

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#160

Post by arlort »

beprogrammed wrote: post #154
Spellman wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally a lot of voting security experts advocate for paper ballots with electronic counting. It is very robust, efficient, has great fallback, and lots of systems available to keep secure.

I envision a system where after I vote I rip off the top of the card and am able to use that hash like token to later verify that my vote was counted correctly

That's only viable in countries/situations where secret ballots are not a strict requirement and vote buying is not perceived to be a problem

With paper ballots if you want to be sure that your vote was counted correctly you generally can go and see the counting process, as a bonus like that you help ensure that every vote is counted correctly

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