How to prove you know a secret without giving it away • Hacker News Board

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#41

Post by jimbob45 » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 4:51 AM UTC

pexabit wrote: post #19

hackerlight wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we should remove all voting machines. Not because they're unsafe, but because they're an attack vector for cynical actors to sow distrust. There's no way the small efficiency gain from automation is worth that cost.

I don’t think a scantron machine not connected to the Internet would sow distrust. We have seen them in our high schools. And Adversarial observers can validate the results on test samples quite easily. Which raises the question- why do we use the really awkward, blackbox and sometimes networked machines that we do, manufactured by weird companies rather than whoever makes scantron machines or whatever? And this isn’…

Why do we use the really awkward, blackbox and sometimes networked machines that we do, manufactured by weird companies rather than whoever makes scantron machines or whatever?

Because they’re cheap, states have to fund their own elections, and no governor will ever fund an election over schools or infrastructure.

The real question is why elections are not federally funded. The answer is that states are afraid election funds will be withheld over speciously related issues, just as highway funds are withheld over drinking ages. IMHO the correct change is a constitutional amendment guaranteeing federal funding for all state elections that can’t be withheld for any reason.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#42

Post by fortuna86 » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 4:52 AM UTC

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #39

bockchain wrote: post #38

> How to prove you know a secret without giving it away This is the best use case for blockchain. Put the secret on the blockchain and show others that transaction. Since it's on blockchain, no one can deny your claim about knowing the secret. This is why blockchain was invented. Before blockchain, I was miserable. There was no way for me to prove to my girlfriends that I knew a secret, without telling the secret. No…

I assume this is excellent satire, but you never really can tell.

You really can't..

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#43

Post by nayaketo » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 4:58 AM UTC

fortuna86 wrote: post #42

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume this is excellent satire, but you never really can tell.

You really can't..

> Before blockchain, I was miserable.

This part gives it away. Also his username which is probably misspelled deliberately.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#44

Post by sdoering » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 4:59 AM UTC

bockchain wrote: post #38

> How to prove you know a secret without giving it away This is the best use case for blockchain. Put the secret on the blockchain and show others that transaction. Since it's on blockchain, no one can deny your claim about knowing the secret. This is why blockchain was invented. Before blockchain, I was miserable. There was no way for me to prove to my girlfriends that I knew a secret, without telling the secret. No…

If all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail.

Thanks for this grandiose piece of satire.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#45

Post by shakow » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 5:04 AM UTC

CodeSgt wrote: post #27

pexabit wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well secure and rather indisputably valid elections are a solved problem, and many countries manage it. Identified electors cast ballots on paper counted under recorded and public observation. (I think a scantron would be fine, too). It is just that we choose not to do this. A provably convincing election isn’t actually some hard, unsolved problem. (And yes- if you mention zero knowledge proofs in your story of why t…

Can you name a country where an actually observably valid election takes place? And by this I mean an election where, somehow, an individual would be able to see their individual ballot make it from wherever they cast it, to the counter, and could see how their specific ballot impacted/didn't impact the broader vote, and where (again, somehow) there was proof that no artificial or false votes were cast in the name of…

Maybe I missed something in your question, but what we have in France seems pretty close.

Our ballots go into a transparent urn, you need to be registered in a voting office and show an ID paper to vote, and people counting the votes are typically a mix of local state employees and volunteers citizens (and given that most people don't want to spend their Sunday evening counting ballots, it's quite easy to get a place).

Now I guess it moves the trust onto the ID system and the aggregation of local counts into national results.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#46

Post by Nursie » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 5:06 AM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #23

defrost wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As demonstrated in central north america recently the real challenge isn't in proving election results .. it's in the greater social challenge of propagating belief and trust in the results in the face of concerted efforts to widely undermine such. That's a whole other kettle of fish.

IIRC, Hillary was among a group claiming "stolen elections" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUqxX0YAafg and that her opponent was an illegitimate president... so, you know, it's not a unique claim. Also miss Abrams seems to make similar claims. These claims happen a bit in local elections.

On the one hand we have the Mueller report which finds that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election in the form of coordinated social media and other 'attacks' on the Clinton campaign. This seems to form some reasonable basis for making claims that the election was ‘stolen’ (informally, and clearly not a legal basis to overturn a result).

On the other you have a narcissist who actually tried to overthrow democracy to stay in power and throws around utterly baseless claims of an organised conspiracy of direct vote subversion and interference in the election mechanism itself, who was also caught trying to coerce others to do that for him over the phone.

These situations are not really comparable.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#47

Post by nikau » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 5:13 AM UTC

nayaketo wrote: post #43

fortuna86 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really can't..

> Before blockchain, I was miserable. This part gives it away. Also his username which is probably misspelled deliberately.

Bockchain - human centipede but with chickens

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#48

Post by pstuart » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 5:16 AM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #23

defrost wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As demonstrated in central north america recently the real challenge isn't in proving election results .. it's in the greater social challenge of propagating belief and trust in the results in the face of concerted efforts to widely undermine such. That's a whole other kettle of fish.

IIRC, Hillary was among a group claiming "stolen elections" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUqxX0YAafg and that her opponent was an illegitimate president... so, you know, it's not a unique claim. Also miss Abrams seems to make similar claims. These claims happen a bit in local elections.

Yawn. First and foremost that's a Fox clip and framing.

More context: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/oct/05/glenn-youn...

She was talking about voter suppression and other tactics rather than the election results being tampered with.

This is important to point out, because the GOP is hellbent on messing with future elections and want an air of whataboutism regarding election integrity.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#49

Post by dataflow » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 5:28 AM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #23

defrost wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As demonstrated in central north america recently the real challenge isn't in proving election results .. it's in the greater social challenge of propagating belief and trust in the results in the face of concerted efforts to widely undermine such. That's a whole other kettle of fish.

IIRC, Hillary was among a group claiming "stolen elections" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUqxX0YAafg and that her opponent was an illegitimate president... so, you know, it's not a unique claim. Also miss Abrams seems to make similar claims. These claims happen a bit in local elections.

No, you're just conflating things horribly.

What Clinton (and I would bet most other folks that you're alluding to from the years prior) had meant by "stolen" elections or "illegitimate" president was emphatically not the same as Trump's wild allegations. She was not claiming "people cast fraudulent ballots" or "the votes were counted incorrectly" or the like. She was not denying what actually happened. Rather, she was using "stolen" to refer to things like "you can get the most votes but still lose the electoral vote, and thus the presidency", or "they make it difficult for your supporters to vote", or things like that. It's unfortunate she used the word "stealing" to refer to that, given that that apparently gave some people a very convenient opportunity to paint a false equivalency between both sides, when in reality she was using that word to make a factual statement about how votes are cast and counted in the system, whereas her opponent was using that word to to hurl unsupported (and "unsupported" is incredibly generous here) allegations of fraud.

Imagine if you were about to get a heart transplant. Someone grabs the donated heart sitting in the operating room and runs. "She stole my heart!", you panic. "Oh don't worry honey, my wife stole my heart too. It's pretty common! It happens to all of us." Imagine the sheer exasperation when you're on life support and now have to spend the remainder of your energy replying to that as a serious comment.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#50

Post by ALittleLight » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 5:32 AM UTC

seewhydee wrote: post #40

Scientists used to use anagrams to register scientific discoveries without revealing them. Hooke registered his law of elastic extension using the letters "ceiiinosssttuv”, which he later revealed to unscramble into "ut tensio, sic vis" ("as the tension, so the force"). People did try to brute-force the anagrams. On two occasions, Kepler unscrambled analgrams from Galileo into the statements that (i) Mars has two moo…

This reminds me of fixing a bug that causes your problem but then you discover the problem persists after the fix and that you actually had two independent bugs causing the same problem.