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UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

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Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#191

Post by gorgoiler »

skobovm wrote: post #187
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.

There’s actually a pretty interesting approach in which: voters can see that their vote counted, everyone can tally anonymous votes, and it is resistant to DoS https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf Of course, the real problem would be explaining to the general population that this works. Great in theory, but will never pan out

If you can verify your vote, how do you stop threats or bribery being used to buy votes?

Show me your receipt saying you voted for Big Ron and I’ll give you a fiver and/or won’t hit you in the knees with a spanner.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#192

Post by smcl »

recuter wrote: post #65
nickt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure the Sunderland lads have already clocked it. Feel free to drop by… https://www.readytogo.net/smb/

Shots fired! I had to look them up. Today I Learned about one of the earliest football paintings in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunderland_A.F.C.#/media/File:... That is pretty neat actually. I don't really follow football but I do enjoy the shit talking. This seems like a fun team to root for actually :)

There's quite a good series on Netflix about the club called "Sunderland 'til I die". The timing was sort of perfect, when it started Sunderland had just been relegated from the Premiership (England's top tier) and I think it was intended to be a series documenting them rebuilding the team and immediately getting promoted back. In reality thought it didn't go like that at all. The team collapsed, their wealthy owner lost interest and stopped supporting them financially, they made a few management blunders and suffered more tragedy that I will not spoil.

I don't support the team, but I still found the series quite fascinating and found myself rooting for them to succeed. I was surprised to see two of my university friends in the show - Sophie (one of the backroom staff who clashed with the management) and another friend who happened to be in the crowd and got an extreme-closeup before/after a goal in one of the match sequences.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#193

Post by dijit »

mschuster91 wrote: post #186
nivenkos wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel was also behind many of the efforts to smear the former opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn - https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/news/israeli-diplomat-sough... The current government is a huge ally of Israel.

Quoted post unavailable.

That's not really how smear campaigns work.

Using a very extreme example: if I got 4 people to call you a pedophile, then people will believe it until you submit proof that you're not.

The problem is that it's impossible to prove the absence of something, so you're forced to push back on me: "Where's your proof that I'm a pedophile", where I can reply with anecdotes or other useless information.

The point is not to "prove" you are a pedophile in that case, the point is to make people associate your name with pedophilia, and to make it unclear if you are or if you aren't. 80% of people will not look further into it.

Pedophilia is probably too extreme of an example and people may be more critical of pedophilia accusations than, say, racism ones.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#194

Post by emsixteen »

mschuster91 wrote: post #186
nivenkos wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel was also behind many of the efforts to smear the former opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn - https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/news/israeli-diplomat-sough... The current government is a huge ally of Israel.

Quoted post unavailable.

Do they really though? Honestly?

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#195

Post by comprev »

Veen wrote: post #40
haltingproblem wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

There's so much that's factually wrong with this comment I don't know where to start. 1. The UK does have a Bill of Rights (It's different in England and Scotland). The English one pre-dates the US Bill of rights by a century[0]. 2. It does have a constitution, but not a written constitution in the American sense[1]. 3. The Queen doesn't nominate Bishops; she rubber stamps nominations by a committee who are approved…

Fun fact: In addition to the Queen, the Speaker of the House of Commons also cannot vote due to their role in keeping order between all parties.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#196

Post by getaloadofthis0 »

petre wrote: post #148
coliveira wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The UK is quite xenophobic as it is. No need for extra laws to prohibit foreigners to ascend to positions of power. Your peers will take care of that. I'm quite surprised that an UK born citizen of Pakistani heritage is currently the mayor of London. Maybe Labour is less xenophobic that the others.

> No need for extra laws to prohibit foreigners to ascend to positions of power.

What on Earth are you talking about?

10% of parliament are from ethnic minorities (including many high profile positions, Tories included), against a UK background of 14%.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...

9% of parliament identifies as gay/bi against a UK background of 5%.

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/12/31/lgbt-mps-gay-lesbian-b...

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#197

Post by rapind »

vlovich123 wrote: post #150
rapind wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is who builds it. I wouldn’t trust election software that wasn’t open source with a lot of eyeballs on it. Diebold wasn’t exactly a shining example to set. Preferably a non profit organization backing it and then having it adopted as a standard. I just don’t see that happening in the US where voter obstruction is part of at least one party’s strategy.

Open source doesn’t actually matter here. A closed source electronic system should work just as well. Why? The way it should work is the machine should just print out a scantron AND a human legible copy (probably with a bar code linking the two). The person submits both by hand. You get early results by counting the scantron. Before certification, there is a statistically significant manual counting of the human legi…

Back in 2004, “Official federal voting system standards require audit logs to record all normal and abnormal events that occur on the system.”

And yet at that time Diebold had a system that did NOT do that deployed all across the US. Someone was deleting votes, and it wasn’t being logged.

Here’s lawmakers saying “should” do something, and an opaque reality where that didn’t happen. It was also running windows…

This is an attack vector. I prefer transparency. Open source would help.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#198

Post by mattmanser »

mschuster91 wrote: post #186
nivenkos wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel was also behind many of the efforts to smear the former opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn - https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/news/israeli-diplomat-sough... The current government is a huge ally of Israel.

Quoted post unavailable.

When did it become a "massive" issue? It was a few isolated incidents that were handled badly. What has happened exactly please? There's been no reports of 'massive' issues. I think you might exaggerating the actual allegations.

Also very suspicious that some of the biggest advocates for Palestinian rights have suddenly become anti-Semites seemingly overnight.

The conversation has moved from Israel's utterly disgusting treatment of the Palestinians to almost trivial claims of anti-Semitism.

One a systematic and brutal campaign of regression against hundreds of thousands of people, the other a few people got called names.

I always thought it was probably a very successfully Mossad smear campaign akin to Putin's anti-Hilary campaign.

And a lot of the British press helped because they hated Corbyn.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#199

Post by skobovm »

gorgoiler wrote: post #191
skobovm wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s actually a pretty interesting approach in which: voters can see that their vote counted, everyone can tally anonymous votes, and it is resistant to DoS https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf Of course, the real problem would be explaining to the general population that this works. Great in theory, but will never pan out

If you can verify your vote, how do you stop threats or bribery being used to buy votes? Show me your receipt saying you voted for Big Ron and I’ll give you a fiver and/or won’t hit you in the knees with a spanner.

Big Ron can ask you to take a picture of the paper ballot as well, so regardless of mechanism you’re in a pretty sticky situation.

It’s not a perfect system, but I would personally find it comforting knowing that I could verify that my vote counted and that I could independently confirm the election results

Edit: haven’t read the paper in a while, but IIRC you can see that the vote counted without revealing details of who you voted for. They definitely would have covered this case

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#200

Post by csmpltn »

CamelRocketFish wrote: post #183
csmpltn wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Like, yeah, blame the UAE mostly for this but let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all. Western countries need to do better." The UK itself is one of the largest weapon exporters in the world, exporting to many countries in the Middle East with dubious human rights track records. The UK government can't possibly know what happens with every single pistol…

The difference is NSO control the Pegasus servers. They know who is using their tools and who is being targeted. This isn’t the same as untraced weapons.

I'm not challenging your assertion, I'm genuinely looking for backing evidence here. Do you have evidence that NSO knows who is being targeted by the tools they sell?
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