Reminds me of the case of the 500-mile email:
Proof of location for online polls
41–50 of 89 posts
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#424chan is going to love this.
This is not a new idea, and I don't believe it will help the malicious actors of the world.
People have been doxxed/compromised in the past by opening links or visiting sites from an adversary who used source IP to geolocate someone.
I can't see it being more than a verification of existing GeoIP databases and possibly a way to detect some VPN use.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#43> Key Advantages: [...] Can provide supportive evidence for VPN/proxy usage, when the latency is too high for all server locations I'm reading through the description, but I'm having trouble understanding the difference between a client having a higher overall latency due to bandwidth/connectivity concerns (e.g. a 3G phone) versus using a VPN. Both would have increased timings and the clock skew would be similar. Wou…
Why is clock skew being used here at all? I'm confused why the client's clock is being trusted or consulted in any way for a measurement like this. I should probably click through and read the details.
ETA Ok, reading the code turned up not a lot of comments. But it did produce the following line. I hope that's for testing and not the actual nonce generation process:
nonce = 'ieoskirlyzauuv6ehdug8lift65fkrddeuu6f5z6ka'
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#44Usefulness of proposed metrics aside, I can't wrap my head around proposed use cases there.
If you don't require proof of identification for voting then one local voter can vote limitless times. If you do require it, why don't you trust it? Surely an identification is enough too choose if someone could vote or not.
It could be a nice addition to some social networks like Mastodon, I suppose, if people wouldn't care enough to create puppet accounts just to swing a vote, and false rejections/positives wouldn't mean losing or gaining something meaningful. Other then that, I have no idea.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#45[dead]
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#46> Latency-based geolocation can help protect poll integrity by: > Detecting when poll responses originate from outside the intended geographic region > Identifying attempts to manipulate polls through elevated VPN/proxy usage Unless the user also needs to complete a reaction-time test, couldn't this be defeated by using a remote desktop connection to a machine that is physically located in the other geography? It jus…
I think this is covered on the page "Successfully manipulating a poll which employs this method would require following efforts and resources: Gaining control over a large number of devices in the target geographic region for submitting votes through those devices" So yes, it seems like it can be defeated via a remote desktop (or any proxy in the allowed area)
Couldn't the "test" add some variety of math challenge, thus making a simple proxy insufficient. Obviously, this method would add more noise to the final calculation, but if the proxy would need to forward its data to the end-user machine to perform the math, then a simple proxy in this case wouldn't be sufficient.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#47Proof of location has been researched/studied for a while. There are systems that depend on a mesh of RF connected nodes and associated economic game (which could be replaced by some government authority) to ensure validity. E.g. https://foam.space/about
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#48Are any major fiber routes hollow-core? HFC signals should be ~50% faster than traditional fiber optic cables, and that might be enough to throw off this data.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#49Have you ever wondered why most studies on humans use college students as test subjects? The answer is that they are easy to survey. Obviously though that can skew results quite a bit because the population is really not all that representative of the general public.
This product will do the same thing: it will help narrow the field of candidates to those who are easy to locate. I guess people who do marketing might like this because look high quality online survey results! And the bias is hidden well enough to keep your job! But the reality is that this will affect the results in a meaningful way.
For example, my ISP doesn’t support IPv6 so my entire home network is served by IPv6 provided by Hurricane Electric via protocol 41. So depending on what this service does with it I would likely be disqualified since my IPv4 is in a different state than my IPv6.
Long story short, cool tech demo and product I would personally avoid using or recommending.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tailscale uses latency to pick home DERPs and I am re-evaluating it as we observe what appear to be manipulated STUN latencies for users in Asia particularly in or close to China. The latencies are often raised to over 300ms to affect this, and steer clients toward the US west coast. The reason for these manipulations is unclear, but it's easy to speculate.
> The reason for these manipulations is unclear, but it's easy to speculate. Care to elaborate? I don’t know why anyone would do this.
This is tin-foil-hat speculation, but for example, if you observe a locality measurement protocol picking where it should connect to, but you already know all of the local sites of interest that are relevant, you might want to find remote sites of interest. If you manipulate the more open sampling protocol to lean toward that remote site, you can then observe where secured connections to which you're otherwise blind, connect to. Now you have new remote targets of interest.